Our objective is to grow the positive environmental impact, the so called environmental handprint, of our solutions and reduce the harmful impacts of our operations. We do this by developing new environmentally friendly solutions, reducing our climate emissions, improving our energy and material efficiency, and minimising our impact on biodiversity and the use of land and water.
Nordkalk’s solutions positive environmental impacts include, for example: less emissions into air (flue gas cleaning), less harmful emissions to receiving water courses (purifying municipal or industrial waste waters), reduced nutrient discharge from agriculture to water systems (structure and agricultural liming), and lake and wetland conditioning through liming (environmental liming).
We develop new, environmentally friendly solutions for our customers’ processes. In practice, this means, for example, new circular solutions, solutions with zero or low carbon footprint or solutions to replace the use of harmful chemicals in our customers’ processes.
We are committed to reducing the carbon emissions of our operations. Ambitious objectives, which are aligned with our owner SigmaRoc’s targets, have been defined in a long-term roadmap called eLIMEnate. By 2032 all our limestone sites are using fossil-free fuels. By 2038 our target is fossil-free quicklime production and carbon neutrality. We aim for fossil-free operations and Net Zero by the year 2040.
We extract the natural mineral resource, limestone, and process it by crushing, milling and calcinating. The extraction and the operation of open pit quarries and underground mines is changing the landscape, involves management of water flows and has impacts on the local biodiversity in the operational phase. On the other hand, land usage and restoring biodiversity values may be taken care of in the post-mining phase. Our aim is to minimise the harmful impacts of our operations by continuous rehabiltation actions, careful planning of water usage and active approach towards restoring biodiversity values.
For us, resource consciousness means utilising all quarried materials as efficiently as possible as well as replacing virgin materials with secondary calcium-based products made of both our internal and external side streams acquired from the market. By increasing the material efficiency of our operations and introducing more circular solutions, less stone can be extracted and less waste is generated. In 2021, we managed to utilise 95% of all extracted materials. Our goal is to reach 100% material efficiency by year 2027.
Read more from our Sustainability report.
