The ultimate beneficiary of any quarrying at Straitgate Farm would be LafargeHolcim – the parent company of Aggregate Industries, now rebadged Holcim – the company that is the subject of this article:
En Serbie, la multinationale 🇨🇭 @LafargeHolcim exploite une cimenterie dont les émissions nocives pour la santé violent en toute impunité les limites légales. Avec son enquête, Milorad Ivanović @BIRN_Network remporte notre #InvestigationAward 2020.https://t.co/mPhViYorjn
— Public Eye (@PublicEyeSuisse) July 2, 2021
In the small town of Beočin, in northern Serbia, the Swiss group Holcim operates a cement plant. In 2019, a state inspection found that the plant's harmful emissions massively exceeded legal limits. But the report has been kept in the shadows and, to date, no proceedings have been initiated. For those affected on the spot, this impunity comes as no surprise. Milorad Ivanović, Serbia, June 30, 2021“We can't breathe here anymore,” complains Jovan Ignjatović, wiping a large layer of dust off the table. “This is what has accumulated since yesterday,” he explains. His house is right in front of the cement factory. The place is shrouded in a thick cloud of smoke. People here say it is a dangerous poison; factory management responds that it is just harmless water vapor.Some 7000 people now live in Beočin. This small industrial town is located at the foot of the Fruška gora mountain range, an hour and a half by car from the capital Belgrade. The cement plant was acquired in 2002 by the French group Lafarge, which merged with Holcim in 2015 to form Lafarge Holcim. As announced last May, the world's largest producer of building materials has now chosen Holcim Ltd. as its sole name, and moved its headquarters to the tax haven of Zug.Before its takeover by Lafarge, the Beočin cement plant was already one of the biggest polluters in the former Yugoslavia, which was dissolved in 2008. But the situation worsened shortly after this takeover, when the management decided to no longer operate its ovens run on natural gas, but with petroleum coke, a by-product of the transformation of crude oil that burns at very high temperatures. Cheaper than natural gas but much dirtier, this refinery waste produces large amounts of microparticles, sulfur dioxide and soot.
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