RadiciGroup Achieves Its Goals
RadiciGroup has reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 70% in the last decade. 80 percent by 2030 is the goal. Radici Chimica Novara is instrumental in lowering the Group's environmental impact.
Setting concrete environmental sustainability goals and leveraging investments and cutting-edge technology to reduce direct greenhouse gas emissions. This is the philosophy that has always guided RadiciGroup, a world-leading manufacturer of chemical intermediates, polyamide polymers, high-performance engineering polymers, and advanced textile solutions, in its operations.
RadiciGroup's strategy has paid off, allowing the company to meet ambitious targets: between 2011 and 2020, the company's overall greenhouse gas emissions were reduced by 70%, from 700,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent per year to 200,000 metric tons.
The action taken by the Group's Specialty Chemicals Business Area at its plants in Novara, Italy, and in Germany, which are at the heart of RadiciGroup's chemicals business, was largely responsible for these results. The Group produces adipic acid, an important intermediate in the production of polyamide 66, which produces nitrous oxide as a by-product.
Nitrous oxide in itself is not particularly problematic (in fact, it is used in the medical sector as an anaesthetic and in the food industry as a spray propellant, in cans of whipped cream, for instance), but, if it is released into the atmosphere, it has a much higher greenhouse gas effect than carbon dioxide.
At the Radici Chimica site in Novara, a multiyear investment budget of over EUR 10 million was dedicated to lowering these emissions through three important undertakings: in 2004, putting into operation a three catalyst bed reactor, designed and patented by the company, to decompose nitrous oxide into nitrogen and oxygen, the two elements it is composed of, thus making it innocuous for the atmosphere; in 2013, installing an EnviNOx plant to decrease the release of nitrous oxide formed in the production of nitric acid, and, in 2021, a further improvement in the emissions abatement system associated with nitric acid production.
More than 35,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent have been saved since the last plant was turned on just 9 months ago. Radici Chimica Novara was able to record nitrous oxide emissions of less than 10 ppm, which is close to zero, as a result of all of the aforementioned actions.
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