Lafarge Africa: Committed to green as new fuel
Trees are integral to nature in more ways than people realize. Apart from providing habitat and food for birds, trees help absorb carbon dioxide that contribute to climate change. Trees also provide habitat, beauty, rain dispersal and harvest. Even fallen tree leaves have an effect in reducing soil temperature. Tree planting is a good way of connecting people to nature.
For this reason, tree planting is a regular activity for employees of Lafarge Africa. At a recent tree planting event with the theme, ‘Connecting People with Nature, Folashade Ambrose-Medebem, the company’s Director of Corporate Communications, Public Affairs and Sustainable Development, highlighted the importance they attach to tree planting.
On that particular occasion, the employees not only planted trees but also took part in environmental awareness campaigns. Over one thousand trees were planted by hundreds of employees in such locations as Mfamosing, Cross River state; Ashaka and Maiganga in Gombe State; Ewekoro and Sagamu in Ogun State and Lagos.
“For Lafarge, protecting the environment and sustainability goes far beyond tree planting alone”, Ambrose-Medebem said, adding, “Lafarge Africa’s strategic aspiration as an industrial company is to conduct business with zero harm to people and the environment.”
According to her, “sustainability is also about taking practical steps to reduce the emission of carbon dioxide across our operations; it is about providing better quality environment and friendly building solutions; it is about improving on our health and safety performance as a company and contributing to the long-term social, environmental and economic development of the country”.
Lafarge Africa is committed to a sustainability strategy tagged ‘The 2030 Plan.’ The 2030 Plan is a triple bottom line approach and focuses on four key fields of action which include climate, circular economy, water and nature, people and communities.
These all aim at protecting the climate throughout the entire construction chain; developing innovative products and solutions for building energy efficiency; promoting a business model that preserves and optimizes natural resources and promotes the development of communities. Lafarge Africa’s sustainability initiatives are consistent with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Lafarge Africa’s parent company, LafargeHolcim, is one of the most carbon efficient cement companies in the world and it continues to do more. Ambrose-Medebem hoped that with a resolute ambition to reduce carbon emission in its cement production by 40 percent by 2030, the journey to that target appears quite feasible. She says that from the 1990s till date, the LafargeHolcim group has already attained about 26 percent reduction in net specific CO2 emissions per ton of cement produced.
Here in Nigeria, Lafarge is well aligned to this global target. Emission reduction makes environmental and economic sense. According to her, “Nigeria is in full alignment with our global vision of constantly working to reduce energy consumption and carbon emission at all stages of our production process, wherever it is feasible, by improving process mastery and sourcing electricity from renewable sources.” There is a number of milestones to validate this. Lafarge Africa is already substituting fossil fuel with the use of renewable energy (fuels from biomass and other wastes) at its Sagamu and Ewekoro plants. There are plans to spread the renewable energy successes in Ewekoro and Sagamu to other plants in the company.
Biomass, an environment-friendly source of fuel generation, converts plant and animal waste into energy, for example, electricity and heat. Biomass energy can be derived from five distinct sources: garbage, wood, waste, landfill gases, and alcohol fuels. It can be relatively easily converted to other usable forms of energy like methane gas or transportation fuels like ethanol and biodiesel. In an age where the ozone layer has been subjected to various tortuous emissions, renewable energy sources such as biomass lessens the effect of global warming.
“Making use of our biomass energy resources such as agricultural waste keeps the money spent within the local economy. Throughout the entire production process, including production, transportation, storage, upgrading, and finally conversion, non-exportable jobs are created. Biomass energy resources reduce the need to source coal or other forms of energy elsewhere”, the director disclosed.
Lafarge Africa has also embarked on rehabilitating its quarries, whether limestone or coal mines, as part of its environment-friendly policies, and she informed that “we are currently evaluating our current practices in order to design acceptable quarry rehabilitation programmes for all mines within the country. The essence of this is to return the mining sites to conditions that are as close to natural as possible”.
To attain its ambitions, Lafarge Africa is exploring partnership opportunities with the Lagos State Waste Management Agency (LAWMA) and Ogun State Ministry of Environment to pre-treat municipal solid waste into usable fuel. “The overall ambition is to ultimately produce Refuse Derived Fuel (RDF) for our plants and help the municipality to reduce landfill problems”, Ambrose-Medebem said.
The Director also spoke of another partnership to recover 108,000 hectares of land which has been stripped of its forests, describing it as “a huge programme intended to create a complete new way of approaching re-forestation.” The partners for the joint development of Ogun State Forest Landscape Restoration Project are Ogun State government and the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA). She disclosed that a memorandum of understanding (MOU) has already been signed, stressing that these sustained efforts by LafargeHolcim have helped solidify its reputation as the most carbon efficient cement company in the world.
She emphasizes the importance of protecting the environment, a continuing collective effort for both individuals and corporate organisations. She wants to see a world where everyone cares for the environment because, in the words of Wendell Berry, an environmental activist, “the earth is all we all have in common”.
Ambrose-Medebem believes that the fight against climate change is about fundamentally reshaping the economy, from the way electricity is generated and products are manufactured to how buildings are designed; how people live and work. “That is why our climate change objectives concern not only our own industrial carbon dioxide emissions, but also the wider construction sector. These objectives are one concrete illustration of how we seek to contribute to Building Better Cities,” she said.
CHUKA UROKO