Azoty Tarnów is one of Poland’s biggest chemical plants, quoted on the Warsaw Stock Exchange since June, 2008. The company is a leading producer of modern construction plastics and compounds. For over eighty years it has also been a known mineral fertilizer supplier. The Azoty Tarnów trademark is known on all world markets, best proof of which is the fact that more than half of the company’s earnings come from foreign sales.
At the moment Azoty is in the course of a broad scale, over PLN 600 million investment programme, which it also announced in its prospectus. PLN 300 million of the investment funding will come from stock sales.
In an effort to meet current market demands Azoty Tarnów is expanding its production capacity to accommodate state-of-the-art technology in construction plastics and compounds, among others for the motor industry, aviation, engineering and the household branch. The company’s self-developed growth strategy is geared to the needs of a modern market and can serve as a model for others. Economically it allows the company to aspire for higher profit margins thanks to a broader product offer ranging from simple chemicals to modern polymers.
Azoty Tarnów are also a showcase example of environment-friendly sustained growth. As one of the very few Polish companies it strives to meet the Kyoto Protocol. In 2008, together with the Mitsubishi Corporation, Azoty completed the first-ever Polish-Japanese joint implementation project in which it reduced its nitrous oxide emissions to the atmosphere (nitrous oxide is one of the most aggressive greenhouse gases). In effect, the company today is not only considerably less pollutive, but also reaps a tangible profit from the move: Since 2009 Azoty Tarnów and Mitsubishi jointly sell Emission Reduction Units (ERU) on the global emission trading market.
Another of Azoty Tarnów’s spectacular environmental projects will be a 2010-planned dry technology ash removal installation in the company’s own coal-fired thermal plant. Today most of the combustion ash produced by the plant lands on waste dumps. In future it will be re-used as a construction raw-material (mainly on road projects, which as of late have been seriously picking up in Poland). Future plans may also include the construction of an environment-friendly gas-fuelled thermal plant. The most likely partner for this undertaking is the Polish Oil and Gas Corporation (PGNiG), which, besides being a shareholder of Azoty Tarnów exploits gas beds in the area.
“Our business is based on sustained growth, especially in protecting natural resources, cutting down pollution, effective raw-material usage, raising local living standards, and ecology. Thanks to this we are able to turn out top-quality products and simultaneously curb our negative impact on the environment”, says Azoty press spokesman Jerzy Jurczyński.
And these are not just words. Over years Azoty Tarnów’s consistent ecological involvement has brought measurable effects, best visible in figures compiled between the company’s 1994 access to the International Responsibility and Care Programme and 2008. In this short time Azoty managed a very noticeable and systematic reduction of equivalent emission (1.8 times), as well as emissions of dust (14.6 times), benzene (12.2 times), cyclohexane (8.4 times), carbon oxide (15 times), nitrous oxides (0.9 times), sewaged ammonia nitrogen (24.9 times), water (1.8 times) and sewage waste (2.3 times).