SHILLONG: Cement giant, Lafarge Surma Cement Ltd (LCS) which is extracting limestone from Meghalaya for its cement plant in Bangladesh, today claimed that it was adhering to and complying with top environmental norms in its mines here as adopted by the company in its operations in top European countries.
"We are following top enviromental norms in our operations here as adopted by the company operation elsewhere in Europe, (Spain, France...)," Lafarge Surma Cements Ltd (LCS) CEO Tarek Elba told reporters here.
According to the CEO, the environmental norms adhered to was important for sustainable development of the area in which the company has its operations.
As per the enviromental norms, the company said it would replace the 935 trees from the mining sites with 4,00,000 trees within a 20 year span in the state.
An amount of Rs 3 crore had been released to the government of Meghalaya for the purpose, N Sharma, Vice President, Lafarge Umiam Mining Pvt Ltd (LUMPL) said.
The LUMPL has been mining limestone at its 935 ha mine and transports raw limestone through a 17 km long conveyor belt to the LSC plant in Chatak in Bangladesh since 2005.
While the company was forced to stop its mining activities in 2007 pending environmental clearance from the Centre, the Supreme Court permitted it to resume operations in July last year.
The permission was given subject to the company's fulfilment of certain conditions in the area of Net Present Value, fulfilment to the Special Purpose Vehicle and Compensatory Afforestation.
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