Aluminium Bahrain (Alba) set a new safety record at its Calciner and Marine plant which succeeded in achieving 1,500,000 work hours without a single lost time injury.

With this feat, Alba's reputation as a smelter dedicated to creating a safe environment for its workers, and ensuring that its operations constantly match global safety standards received a substantial boost, said a company statement.

Alba is one of the very few smelters in the world that has its own calciner plant, which has met all of the company’s calcined coke needs since it was commissioned in 2001.

The plant, the first of its kind in the Middle East, was built on 140,000 sq m of reclaimed land at Alba’s private marine terminal.

The main raw material used in the production of the carbon anodes is made at the Calciner plant, which can produce as much as 600,000 tonnes of calcined petroleum coke a year, eliminating the need to import, and allowing significant cost savings.

The company said the Calciner and Marine’s achievement amounts to an accident free work environment for a total of five years.

Alba has regularly enforced rigorous safety standards throughout the plant, and these have earned the company global accolades such as, the prestigious safety and occupational health awards from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) and the British Safety Council that Alba has won for three consecutive years. 

Commenting on the Calciner and Marine’s record achievement, Alba chief executive Laurent Schmitt said: 'Alba greatly values safety as an integral component of its operations, and is committed towards making safety a state of mind whereby each and every employee thinks, acts and behaves to eliminate unsafe acts.'

'Safety is fundamental in our aim to transform Alba into a globally competitive smelter. I like to congratulate Mohammed Shuja, the manager of Calciner and Marine, and his team for having achieved 1,500,000 work hours without a single lost time injury,' he stated.

'This achievement demonstrates the importance of working together as a team in fulfilling organisational goals, and then, going one step ahead and setting records that would make everyone proud,' Schmitt added.

The Coke Calcining project also included the construction of a seawater desalination plant, which utilises waste heat from the calcining process to make drinking water.-TradeArabia News Service