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Friday, October 10, 2003
Heavy industry, healthy environment mix at Pasar
By Cherry Ann T. Lim
Of Sun.Star Cebu
THE Philippine Associated Smelting and Refining Corp. (Pasar), the first copper smelter and refinery in Southeast Asia and the only one in the Philippines, has married heavy industry operations and environmental protection in a win-win formula that has enabled it to not only keep the area clean but also earn from what would have been considered industrial waste.
Pasar’s 80-hectare smelter and refinery complex at the Leyte Industrial and Development Estate in Isabel town in Leyte produces refined copper, which is used in the manufacture of electric wires and cables for the telecommunications industry as well as for electrical applications.
During a plant tour by Manila and Cebu journalists last Friday, Thomas Gonzales, Pasar assistant to the president for operations, said watches, computers, lights, cameras, air conditioners—generally anything with electricity uses copper.
This is why refined copper is among the Philippines’ top 10 exports.
Waste
Hardly anything goes to waste at one of the largest copper smelters in the world as Pasar also sells the by-products of its operations, like sulfuric acid, gold, silver, granulated slags, gypsum, selenium, platinum and antimonial lead, to buyers in the fertilizer, textile, glass, photocopying, shipbuilding, cement, and jewelry industries.
But it is not the plant’s export sales—92 percent of its total output—that Pasar is crowing about these days.
The export target this year is about $500 million, according to Mirardo Malazarte Jr., senior vice president for operations and production.
Ricardo Santiago, senior vice president, human resources management and plant administration, told Sun.Star that Pasar had won the Regional Award for Environmental Protection by the Bureau of Mines.
It has now been endorsed by the bureau to represent Eastern Visayas in the national competition.
Santiago revealed that the Isabel plant had already received a certificate from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources indicating that the smelter had met the requirements of the Clean Air Act.
But he said: “What we want is to do more.”
For environmental projects alone, Pasar has spent over P900 million. Last year alone, it allocated P176 million for the setting up of “converter fugitive gas hoods,” to better collect escape gases from the converter furnace operations.
This has resulted in cleaner air in the plant.
For the solid by-products of its operations, Gonzales said the materials are first wrapped in bags
and stored in a “covered storage building” until they are sold.
Bunkers
On the other hand, for the materials nobody wants to buy, Pasar puts them in concrete bunkers that are “sealed 100 percent from the environment.”
In the past, solid by-products were stored in environmentally acceptable lime-lined landfills and covered with soil. But now, through the more expensive concrete bunkers, Pasar can store the materials above ground, allowing easy inspection of these materials’ entombment.
“The company is the first in the region to employ this kind of disposal system,” Santiago said.
For liquid waste, settling ponds with automatic PH control at various discharge points catch industrial and rain water for neutralizing before it is discharged into the ocean.
“The ponds also serve as a loss control facility ... all solids that settle in the ponds are periodically retrieved and recycled back to the process to recover valuable metals,” Santiago said.
Going a step further in protecting marine life, Pasar is also now two years into the rehabilitation of the mangrove areas around the complex to replace the “denuded portion of the shoreline” affected by the plant’s commercial operations for over 20 years now, Santiago said.
So far, about 2,000 mangrove trees have been planted. Mangroves serve as natural breeding grounds for marine life, in addition to helping prevent siltation and erosion of the coastal areas.
The area outside the complex is now a fish sanctuary.
For gas pollutants, Pasar has a plant that converts sulfur dioxide, a pollutant if released directly into the air, into sulfuric acid, which it then sells to fertilizer makers.
Pasar was set up by the Philippine government. It was privatized in 1999 when a consortium of Philippine investors and Swiss trader Glencore International AG acquired 90 percent of the government’s shareholdings.
(October 10, 2003 issue)
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