Metinvest CEO Yuriy Ryzhenkov believes the company’s steel plants in Mariupol will meet European emissions standards “within two or three years.”
He shared his prediction at Metinvest’s 15th birthday celebration in Kyiv, also telling reporters that Metinvest had spent over $1 billion on projects to reduce pollution, $200 million of which was in 2020 alone.
The steel and mining company’s revenues for 2020 were $10.54 billion, with a net profit of $526 million.
Ryzhenkov said that the company is currently in the process of building systems at its Azovstal and Illyich plants to capture and clean harmful converter gases created during the steel oxidation process.
Ryzhenkov also announced that the blast furnaces at the Illyich plant will most likely be changed to new, more efficient furnace by “2026 or 2028.”
“In the last seven years, the pollution levels of Metinvest’s plants in Mariupol have halved,” he said.
However, the company’s rate of transition towards cleaner steel production is regarded as far too slow by many residents of Mariupol, a Donetsk Oblast city of nearly 500,000 people located 775 kilometers southeast of Kyiv.
In 2018, several thousand people from the city chanted the slogan “We want to breathe” at a protest against Metinvest’s plants in the city and company owner Rinat Akhmetov, who is the richest man in Ukraine.
The company has been nicknamed “Smertinvest” (“Deathinvest”) by some Mariupol residents. As of 2018, the city’s air contained ten times more industrial pollution than the Ukrainian average, causing an alarmingly high rate of lung cancer deaths, among numerous other ailments.
A Metinvest representative told the Kyiv Post that the high cancer rates are “largely as a result of IDPs” from occupied areas of Donbas.
Higher quality steel
According to Ryzhenkov, the lack of a Ukrainian producer of high-quality steel, such as polymer or zinc coated variants, severely limits the country’s manufacturing potential.
“Because of this there is no development of machine building or home appliances (in Ukraine). It is impossible to attract a car manufacturer here,” he said.
The company plans to make high quality steel at the Illyich plant, which would attract these industries to the country.
This is part of Metinvest’s wider goal to focus on the domestic steel market in Ukraine.
To this end, the company is partially sponsoring the construction of Ukraine’s first residential buildings made of steel, hoping to kick-start the growth of a new market for Metinvest.
At the same time, Ryzhenkov announced that the company has signed a contract with Italian firm Danieli to build a rolling mill in Italy. This will help to avoid trade barriers encountered when importing rolled steel from Ukraine into the EU.
