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Natural environment

Natural environment

The basic directions of managerial activity connected with environmental protection have been specified in detail in the Sustainable Development Strategy for 2017-2020. These activities fall under two categories as follows:

  • maximizing the effective economic use of raw materials extracted from nature (both deposits of coal and other raw materials accompanying its extraction)
  • limiting the adverse impact on the natural surroundings and ensuring environmental safety on an ongoing basis

The Group assumes that the best measure of responsibility for the environment is the effectiveness of actions. Any imperfections of technologies or deficiencies in management should be eliminated. This opens space for a great number of research projects and for seeking innovative solutions to help us act in an effective and profitable manner, at the same time protecting the natural surroundings. This is an inexhaustible area for research centers to do research involving the industry. This is a stimulus for seeking innovative, efficient and cost-effective technologies. What is most important is effective use of exploited and profitable to extract coal deposits but also effective economic use of methane co-occurring with coal deposits, coke oven gas, and optimizing energy consumption and fuel use. What should be also noticed are actions aiming to search for innovative and economically justified methods of using waste rock or extract salt from mine waters.

Another key area from the perspective of research and development are any projects connected with the so called clean coal technologies. To contribute to an acceleration of activities connected with seeking and implementing innovative solutions which bring both economic and environmental benefits, research competences were concentrated in one unit, which led to setting up the company named JSW Innowacje.

JSW Innowacje is to be at the same time a platform allowing for cooperation in the area of research and development with business partners (B2B) and academic and scientific centers (B2U), using a broad range of external financing sources (the National Fund for the Protection of the Environment and Water Management, the National Center for Research and Development). It is of key importance to see research and innovative projects from the angle of effectiveness, including profitability, of the projects, which in principle should have a practical significance for the Group and the industry.

Apart from long-term strategic goals, there are also objectives connected with strategic operational management. These are to ensure environmental safety today – both to nature and to inhabitants of the local community. Therefore, they focus to a large extent on compliance with specific norms or procedures, monitoring current environmental parameters, reacting to detected departures and taking repair and corrective measures when irregularities are found. Similarly to other business areas (e.g. occupational health and safety), what is critically important for the operation of JSW in this area is that it has an environmental management system based on the PN-EN ISO 14001 standard – aiming to improve an organization continuously and constituting a guarantee of exercising due care. The condition for such a system’s operation is to have an appropriate environmental policy.

At the level of JSW, the environmental policy is described in the document entitled Policies of the Integrated Management System of Jastrzębska Spółka Węglowa S.A. This is to ensure, on the one hand, compliance with legal requirements and, on the other, ongoing limitation of adverse influence on the natural environment in the entire process of extracting, processing and selling coal.

In 2017, the Group continued to implement the principles adopted in its environmental strategy. This purpose was served by the performance of the specified environmental protection tasks.

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