HOUSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--At a ceremony on March 19, 2007, the Portland Cement Association (PCA) and Cement America’s Magazine recognized CEMEX’s cement operations in Davenport, Calif. with the Land Stewardship Award and the CEMEX Knoxville, Tenn. location for the Innovation Award at the annual Environment and Energy Awards, some of the most prestigious awards in the industry. Land Stewardship Award The Davenport plant won in the Land Stewardship category for demonstrating superior land conservation and environmental stewardship practices on its 10,000 acres located in Santa Cruz County, California. The plant successfully continues exemplary land restoration projects, such as the reclamation in the Davenport shale and limestone quarries. Each year, the people of the Davenport plant perform habitat restoration and re-vegetation with native trees, perform exotic weed control and exotic tree removal in order to enhance growth of native habits and species, and retain a professional landscape architect to manage the program. They also have created a large forested buffer area around the quarry operation for screening and buffering the neighboring rural community. Innovation Award The CEMEX Knoxville, Tenn. cement operations won in the Innovation category for successfully implementing programs to find ways to reduce NOx emissions. A few years ago, the CEMEX Process Technology team, led by Robin Forster, began using an old technology in a new way--injecting water into the cement kiln’s burner pipes to reduce NOx. Although the application was a proven method in the power industry for years, it had never been widely used in cement kilns. The team embarked on a series of massive tests and discovered that this technology not only worked in cement kilns, but it also worked exceptionally well and could reduce NOx by 15 percent. This discovery is a major reason the CEMEX Knoxville operations were selected for the Innovation Award.
