Reducing waste and emissions, increasing production efficiency, and enhancing our natural environment are all key aspirations for the industry. Around a quarter of all lime produced is used in the protection of the environment and a significant proportion of that is in cleaning of emissions from other industrial processes that are burning fuels and wastes that contain pollutants that have strictly controlled permitted emissions limits or have waste streams that are acidic and harmful requiring treatment with lime prior to their licensed release to the environment.
Lime and Dolime manufacturing are regulated through the Environmental Permitting Regulations and themselves require operating permits from the Environment Agency. As part of their environmental permit, British manufacturers implement the ‘Best Available Techniques’ – BAT – for environmental protection. They manage their manufacturing processes and maintain their emissions monitoring and abatement equipment to ensure that they continue to operate below permitted thresholds.
The European Lime Association, of which MPA Lime are members, has published European lime sector Environmental Product Declaration's (EPD's) that include UK manufacturing data from MPA Lime members and therefore provide lime sector EPD's including the UK. These EPD's for hydrated lime, quicklime and dolime are freely available on the Environdec platform in the EPD Library. Please go to the Environdec platform library and search for 'European Lime Association' and the three EPD's are easily found.
For applications, such as mortars, renders and as an asphalt additive etc., the product used is hydrated lime and for applications, like soil stabilisation in the UK, quicklime is normally used. Dolime is predominantly used in the metal manufacturing and refractories industries.