BAT Identification in a Cement Plant

Best Available Techniques, BATs, are adopted in industry to comply with existing regulations, to improve environmental records and often for economic reasons as well. To decide on the BATs to im- plement in a specific installation, it is necessary to search in the bibliography and published previous ex- periences and practices. And for any individual plant, both general aspects of the industrial sector under study and particular characteristics of the plant under consideration (type of process used, geographical allocation, regulations to be complied with, and so on) must be taken into account. In the present work such an analysis is applied to a cement plant with a conventional rotary kiln. A cus- tomized flow sheet of the stages involved including inputs and outputs to and from each stage, is prepared (Fig. 1). Follow the identification of the environmental circumstances of the plant to continue with the proposal of BATs, to improve the environmental record of the plant. Some of the BATs suggested were incorporated to the process whilst others were discarded.