Posco vows to clean up factories

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Posco vows to clean up factories

Posco will invest more than 1 trillion won ($894.5 million) over the next three years to cut pollutant emissions from its steel mills by 35 percent, the company said Tuesday.

The company plans to invest a total of 1.07 trillion won to make its facilities eco-friendly. The move comes as fine dust becomes an increasingly serious problem in Korea.

Posco will first replace or reform old by-product plants to reduce emissions of pollutants, including nitrogen oxide and sulfur oxide. The two materials are known to make up 65 percent of fine dust, Posco said.

Steelmakers use by-product plants to reuse by-product gases from the coke oven, blast furnace and basic oxygen furnace to save energy resources.

The gases can be used to generate power.

Posco said it will close down six of the 21 by-product plants it operates by 2021 and inject 350 billion won into establishing new state-of-the-art plants.

For the remaining 15 plants, the company will add equipment for selective catalytic reduction.

The equipment, according to Posco, will help cut as much as 85 percent of the nitrogen oxide emitted from the plants by converting the chemical into non-toxic materials, such as nitrogen and oxygen. Roughly 330 billion won will be spent on adding the equipment.

The Korean steelmaker will also add 10 internal storage facilities to keep dust from spreading into the air. The company plans to spend 300 billion won by 2020 to set up additional storage from its existing 33 storage facilities.

Posco has been using 10 percent of its budget allocated for facility improvement to make facilities eco-friendly every year, the company said. The investment announcement on Tuesday, however, exceeds its past spending.

Last year, about 172.5 billion won was spent on improving the environment while about 196.5 billion won was used for the same purpose in 2017, according to company data.


BY KIM JEE-HEE [kim.jeehee@joongang.co.kr]
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