Displaying items by tag: Egypt

Egypt: Italcementi subsidiary Suez Cement has announced that workers at two of its factories in Suez and Katamiya started a strike on 14 March 2012. The strike has halted shipping at these plants although production has not been affected. In a separate statement Suez Cement said that strike action at its Tourah plant ended on 20 March 2012.

Egypt: Bedouin in Egypt's Sinai Peninsulas kidnapped 25 mostly Chinese cement factory workers on 31 January 2012. They demanded that authorities free fellow tribesmen from prison, sources from the tribe said.

"We will not release the Chinese until our demand for the release of these sons of Sinai are met," said one of the Bedouin who wanted to remain anonymous.

The workers were kidnapped on their way to a Sinai Cement plant and were being held in a tent near a road that the Bedouin had blocked for the past three days to press their demand, the sources said. They said their jailed tribesmen were arrested between 2004 and 2006 as part of an investigation into bombings at the Taba resort on Sinai's Red Sea coast in which 31 people were killed.

Egypt: The Egyptian Industrial Development Authority (IDA) has announced that it will issue 12 cement licences in the second half of October 2011 to lure new firms into the Egyptian market and boost the sector's competitiveness.

"The authority aims to offer 18Mt/yr, 1.5Mt/yr per licence," said IDA head, Ismail El-Nagdy, who added that the licences will be awarded to new producers rather than existing ones in order to offer alternatives to consumers.

The popular uprising that ousted long-time President Hosni Mubarak from power in Egypt in February 2011 has forced the government to slash its short-term economic growth forecast and deepened a crisis in the once-booming real estate sector, a major cement consumer. The IDA says that new entrants into the cement market are needed to meet an expected longer-term rise in construction, especially as the Housing Ministry builds more housing units to meet the needs of Egypt's growing population.

Egypt: In collaboration with the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency (EEAA) Suez Cement Group of Companies (SCGC) has begun the implementation of a new integrated alternative fuel (AF) system at its Kattameya plant in New Cairo.

"As part of the activities to enhance our sustainability, this project will realise environmental returns through the application of advanced technologies for using AFs in cement production operations, a matter which will maximise our competitiveness and reduce the use of traditional energy sources thus helping the country," said Carlo Foroni, technical director of the SCGC. "This will also relieve the community from the need to treat their waste materials and will also limit CO₂ emissions," Foroni added.

According to Mohamed Aymen, SGCC environment affairs manager, following EEAA's 2009 approval of burning agricultural and municipal wastes at the company's Kattameya and Helwan plants, industrial testing started at Kattameya through a pilot feeding line. "All of these products will be recycled and used as an alternative fuel by being safely burnt at cement kilns," said Aymen.

While the environmental impact assessment for using alternative fuel systems at the Suez plant is underway, the project's feeding line will already be applied as planned at the company's Helwan plant later in 2011.