The circular economy principles of re-use and recycle are enabling Morgan Advanced Materials to significantly improve its environmental health and safety targets, and turn waste furnace rock into new roads.
Morgan Advanced Materials has revealed the results of some of its recent Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) activity, which saw a major commitment to embracing sustainability initiatives across its global sites.
As a result, the UK-headquartered manufacturer has enjoyed instances of a 50% reduction in chlorine use at one of its sites, a 23% saving in natural gas usage at a site, and a 7% global reduction of energy intensity across the group.
This is in addition to the group achieving a 5% reduction in water intensity and a 1% reduction on waste intensity throughout 2015, when compared to the previous year.
Perhaps the most interesting example of a circular economy in action though, can be seen at one of Morgan’s US sites, which is effectively facilitating the re-use of aggregate waste material into temporary road surfaces.
The company’s Georgia-based manufacturing facility – which specialises in Thermal Products for high temperature insulation – manufactures a range of products including insulating fibre, fire bricks and fired refractory shapes, which are used to manage heat and reduce energy usage in industries such as petrochemical, iron, steel, ceramics and cement production.
The typical form of disposal for these materials is through landfill sites, but Morgan has been working closely with the local landfill operator to re-use the material to construct temporary road surfaces. These have replaced a number of gravel-coated roads in the landfill site, diverting more than 6,000 tonnes of waste from general landfill.
The global EHS improvement plan is being led across the group by Morgan Advanced Materials CEO, Pete Raby, in conjunction with the company’s internal health and safety initiative, thinkSAFE.
Raby commented: “The dilemma of how to deal with rising energy demand and materials waste will not be solved by one single solution, we need a combination of efforts.
“Energy efficiency improvements, clean energy initiatives and education to reduce consumption and re-use waste will all make a difference.”
