Sidenor 2021 Sustainability Report. Non-financial information statement

58 Sustainability Report 2021 | Environmental sustainability Emissions Sidenor has invested over 17 million euros in research and technology in order to reduce particle and CO 2 emissions into the atmosphere. Sidenor’s special steel production plants have modern smoke vacuum and purification systems, which highly efficiently capture the particles generated during the process. This filtered material, which was before intended for landfill, is now a by-product that is used as a raw material in the zinc recovery industry. Thus, Sidenor reaffirms its commitment to searching for more sustainable solutions for its activities. In addition, Sidenor intends to continuously introduce improvements in order to reduce CO 2 generation. Among these are the following: the installation of state-of-the-art burners in order to reduce NO x emissions in treatment furnaces, the development of projects focussed on energy efficiency, the continuous technological updating and the use of scrap as the main raw material. Water is a vital natural resource, as it is essential for life in every respect. Aware of this aspect, Sidenor works to improve the quality of industrial water and manage to replace drinking water consumption in facilities that are particularly sensitive without damaging the quality of our products. Since February 2021, the Piscinas 4 installation at Sidenor’s Basauri plant, used for bloom machine cooling, has started using previously filtered industrial water instead of the drinking water that had been used so far. This meant savings of 32,745 m 3 of drinking water in 2021, 18% of consumption . 2021 2020 Specific water consumption 1.4 1.8 Water consumption (m 3 ) 1,000,589 976,957 Specific water discharge (m 3 /t.l.s.) 0.9 0.9 Water discharge (m 3 ) 667,727 508,774 Water EXAMPLES OF EFFICIENT WATER USE