After seven years of hiatus, in March Italcementi will re-ignite the kilns of the Sarche plant, in Trentino, where there is a long-term investment project and a hiring plan. This is the restart of the cooking phase that was suspended in 2015 due to market trends. Grinding, on the other hand, has always been active, with the semi-finished product brought to Sarche from other plants in the North.
Going into detail, the technical director Agostino Rizzo explains that «the company has assumed a long-term investment of about 20 years. For now, 5 million euros have been made available and 30 hires are added to the 18 workers already in business. Environmental interventions are planned with the aim of reducing emission levels. Furthermore, the semi-finished product will be produced within the site, so the heavy traffic for the transport of the material will be reduced compared to the past ». The investment is almost entirely destined to improve environmental performance
In recent years, around the Trentino plant of the company, which is part of the German multinational Heidelbergcement group, various concerns have been raised by the environmentalists of the Valle dei Laghi Committee, who have not yet fully recovered. The reassurances of the company do not convince the Committee, which has collected more than 2 thousand signatures against the restarting of the ovens.
To guarantee compliance with the emission levels, the Council Commission has decided that the Provincial Agency for the Environment will carry out a monitoring plan 24 hours a day to measure the effects of possible pollutants. «To date, an annual production of about 200 thousand tons of product is expected – says Rizzo -. The establishment can coexist with the environment, especially as transparency is not lacking. The environmental monitoring data are and will always be viewable ».