The goal of optimising raw material use, limiting waste production, and recycling products and industrial wastes is causing national productive sectors to resort with more efficient and clean processes and work systems. The outcome of such a chain of new procedures is a tremendous cutting of expenses and potential acquisition of new demanding external markets when it comes to the production processes which inflict a lesser damage on the environment. According to professor Luis Nunes de Oliveira, deputy coordinator of the exact sciences areas of the scientific directorate of FAPESP, The Cost-Benefit of Clean Tech is essential to consider.
Adoption of clean technologies saves companies a lot of money and firms gain more revenue. Within the context of the country to have this strategic policy, seven projects financed by FAPESP open and demonstrate new role binding of clean technologies application and development. These ventures include civil works, metal recycle and use of packaging. According to Vahan Agopyan, a civil engineer and professor at the Polytechnic School of the University of Sa or Paulo (USP), civil construction.
Direct Economic Advantages
Is the sector of the economy which causes the greatest damage to nature, because of the quantity of natural resources it consumes. The research conducted by Agopyan deals with projects that will reuse garbage. One of these, converting the dross of a steel mill (which is useless) into a valuable raw material leading to the production of a new, twice as strong and 40% cheaper cement than ordinary cement, is one of the most significant. The cement, together with activators, which are substances.
Produced by sodium silicates, sulfates and calcium hydroxides obtain low alkalinity giving the freedom to dissolve some fibers with the mixture. Due to fiberglass, the slag cement is a powerful and easily malleable compound. According to Agopyan, who organized the project Reinforced Glass Fiber Slag Cement Panels, which was developed within the FAPESP Technological Innovation Partnership Program (PITE), the waste was valorized by means of this research, becoming a very good industrial material. At the time of completion of this project.
Strategic Economic Advantages
Which was two years ago, the only option that steel mills had was to pay in order to dispose the garbage in the industrial landfills. As time goes, this slag crystallizes, and forms rocks made of heavy metals that poison the ground water according to Agopyan. Closely every year, Brazilian steel mills get, as byproduct of the steel production, some 6 million tons of slag in their blast furnace. Now they not only have the money saved that they have previously spent.
In disposing it, but they also make a profit on its slag. The Companhia Siderrgica de Tubarao (CST) which is based in Vitria, Espirito Santo helped facilitate this project and is currently making 9 million annually through the sales of the slag to four cement sector players. In the past, the entire quantity of its production which was 1.7 million tons of a year was to go to the shelves of only two companies that had the product within their storehouses. How were our customers going to use so much slag, says Paulo Lana, special sales manager at CST. Agopyan will be the first Brazilian to be a board.
Advanced Economic Perspectives
Member of the International Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction (CIB) which has more than 50 years of existence, as a vice president. He says this is not a fad as far as the environment is concerned. To the extent that the CIB, which takes up a new theme at each congress (the frequency of the same being every three years) has done so regarding 2001 (sustainable construction) beginning where it had left it 3 years earlier (in 1998) (sustainable construction).
The second intervention made by Agopyan in the subject area, together with other researchers at USP, was to co-write a text of a resolution of the National Environmental Council (Conama) on the subject of the construction wastes, which will assign municipalities more powers to supervise the construction companies and carriers in the production and transportation of the debris of construction civil construction.
Conclusion
At this time what is written in the resolution is being scrutinized in the technical chamber of environmental control at Conama. The use of asbestos in the tiles composition remains the very important issue that needs to be addressed by the civil building industry. Consumption of this mineral is illegal in 21 countries, since it brings health complications. By January, 2005, the ruling will be in effect to all European Union member states. However in Brazil, manufacturers of water tanks, tiles, and brake pads kept using that mineral fiber. The federal bill which undoubtedly prohibited asbestos.
Use in the Brazilian industry with the argument that the substance is carcinogenic and causes lung diseases did not enter into force and was substituted by a new one stating its limited application. However, the substitution of asbestos in the Brazilian tiles will come true due to a PITE project Development of a Technology to Produce Asbestos Free Fiber Cement Tiles – coming into being through partnership between the companies Infibra-Permatex and Imbralit who are in the states ofSP and SC, respectively. The primary role of the project is to remove asbestos and replace it with plant and plastic.
