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Call to Relocate Hazardous Industries

Call to Relocate  Hazardous Industries
Call to Relocate  Hazardous Industries

Stringent measures are to be taken to move polluting industries out of the bustling capital as per Tehran’s Comprehensive Plan, the Five-Year Municipal Plan, and a government plan of action decided in 1990, ISNA reported.

“Reorganizing industries and guilds in Tehran, especially the plating guilds, is on the agenda,” said Reza Ghadimi,  managing director of Tehran Municipality’s Organizing Industries and Occupations Center (OIOC).

The organization is in charge of dealing with polluting or hazardous industries. Vehicle recycling units and nut (trail mix) roasting factories would be the first to be moved to far away non-residential areas, according to Ghadimi.

Plating – a type of metal treatment or coating – is an effective key stage in the production process of metal goods. It is highly pollutant and must therefore be relocated to industrial areas. This is planned to happen in cooperation with the ministry of industry, mine, and trade, Tehran Industrial States Company, the Department of Environment (DoE), and the OIOC.

In traditional methods, plating is done with minimum facilities in small workshops within industrial units. But the resultant vapor can cause serious respiratory and dermatological diseases among workers while also harming and endangering the environment.

Additionally, heavy metals that find their way from plating factories into the southward flow of ground waters get absorbed in fields of Varamin (a crowded district south of Tehran Province).

The managing director of OIOC noted that the plating workshops in most countries have been transformed into factories that are settled in industrial regions outside metropolitan areas. Wastewater treatment plants are built near such areas to control the generated vapor and sewage.

He said permits to set up administrative offices in the city were issued as the industrialists were asked to move their workshops to remote areas, “but such polluting plating industries still operate in Tehran suburbs, namely in Ahmadabad-e Mostowfi and Jajrood.

There are 200 licensed plating firms operating across the capital. Iranian Plating Industrial Association (IPIA) refuses to disclose the list of 700 unlicensed units in spite of the fact that they are all directly or indirectly linked to the association.

“Members of the guild have for long resisted the relocation plans saying it would be very costly and render them insolvent,” said Ghadimi and called on the law enforcement and the DoE to help bring the plating operations in urban areas to a permanent end.

The IPIA was given a grace period to upgrade the industry from its old and traditional condition to a modern and environmentally -friendly status. That period is now over.

 

Financialtribune.com