Waste

saved Elkem Bremanger

Gunnar Sand

Einar Kjerpeseth has been a driving force in the process of creating products from waste.

Einar Kjerpeseth (53) has been on the staff of Elkem Bremanger since 1960. He describes himself as an autodidact who has taken a few courses in chemistry "on the way." The courses were well worth taking, because Kjerpeseth has been a driving force in the task of creating products from waste. Now he is sales manager with the responsibility for getting them out on the market.

The smelter in Svelgen, Bremanger, fifty kilometres from Florø in the County of Sogn og Fjordane, has gone through a hard process of reorganization. First, there were demands from SFT, State Pollution Control Authority, for wide-ranging emission scrubbing measures, then came a flood of cheap silicon from China and Eastern Europe that sent the market price of this metal into free fall.

"The giant is breathing heavily and twisting in pain. Thousands of people in Bremanger are watching the drama in the crisis-torn heavy industry with anxiety. If the smelter dies, the local community will also die and become a ghost town," wrote the newspaper Bergens Tidende in the decisive days of Autumn 1992.

A year and a half later, the sun is shining again in Svelgen. The mood is relaxed. A thin stripe of white smoke rises from a factory that lies reflected in a clear and apparently clean fjord. At the reception desk, we find copies of the quarterly report which tells of better days for the Elkem concern and the smelter itself.

20,000 tons into the sea

"The first time we arrived, we met the brown mud far out in the fjord," remembers, Ole Wærnes, departmental manager at SINTEF Applied Chemistry who became the works' most important partner together with Professor Gunnar Thorsen of NTHΔs Dept. of Chemical Engineering.

Behind the smelter they could see a brown burnt-out ridge of forest, a witness to the sins of earlier days, when Bremanger produced crude iron and spewed out sulphur.

The sea outside the works was a sad sight. A solution of chlorides of iron, aluminium, calcium, and an assortment of other metals went right into the bay. The volumes involved were enormous. Total releases came to about 20,000 tons a year.

Another 40,000 tons of dust that had previously gone up with the smoke were being dealt with by filters. This was the germ of Elkem's waste-scrubbing philosophy: to regard waste and emissions as unutilized resources. The microsilica dust is now being sold at a healthy profit as an additive to concrete.

Recovering iron chloride

The project was successful. In autumn 1990, Bremanger opened an iron extraction plant that produced 15,000 tons of iron chloride a year - much more than was needed in the process. Kjerpeseth and his colleagues looked around and found a market for the product as a precipitating agent in sewage treatment systems. Even better, the price was so good that they decided to sell the whole of their production to this market, while they continued to buy scrap iron for the process.

"It was difficult to penetrate the market," remembers Einar Skjerpseth. A Finnish company virtually had a monopoly in Scandinavia. However Elkem got a foot in the door in southern Sweden and gradually forced its way into the market.

Crystallizing out aluminium chloride

"We had the go-ahead to finish the project, but we were working under pressure," says Kjerpeseth. The time factor meant that plans for a pilot project had to be dropped. We moved straight from the laboratory to a full-scale plant. Kjerpeseth admits that he was nervous at times. "It simply had to work," he says.

This project went well too. The new installation was ready in winter 1992 and it now produces 12,000 tons of aluminium chloride a year. It is sold as a precipitating agent for purifying drinking water.

This left the company with the remaining metals. Doing anything with them was regarded as uneconomical, so they are dried out and shipped to Langøya off Holmestrand, where they are dumped.

Cost NOK 50 million

Without the scrubbing technology and additional products, he believes, the silicon metal production line would have been closed down today, and 150 people would have lost their jobs. The smelter would also have had only a few products left, which would have left it in a vulnerable position.

Today the surroundings of Bremanger Smelter look clean, to the pleasure of everyone who lives and breathes in Svelgen. "Most of the problems were probably cosmetic. Bu of course we had to clean the place up. It didn't look good."

The emissions into the sea did not kill fish, but they covered the seabed with sludge and gave the surface a nasty brown colour. The atmosphere used to have an unpleasant hat of smoke which gave the sun a reddish glow. Housewives had a difficult relationship with us. Their washing didn't look good when the wind was blowing," says Kjerpeseth.

For some reason, it was difficult to make people understand the point of waste recovery. "People regarded chloride as waste, even within Elkem. The rest of the world still talks of how we cleaned up the fjord, without giving a thought to the fact that we have actually created new products," he says.

Not aware of better solutions

Einar Kjerpeseth agreeas. "The SINTEF people have been very useful sparring partners, and personal relationships were good", he says.