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INDUSTRY NEWS TRI Welcomes Possehl Erzkontor and Steel Valley Firebrick/Maryland Refractories The Board of Directors of The Refractories Institute has approved the application of Possehl Erzkontor N.A. Inc. for Associate membership in the Institute. Headquartered in Strongsville, Ohio, the company will be represented by Joseph Hughes who is the General Manager. TRI welcomes the Maryland Refractories division of Steel Valley Firebrick to the Institute membership as well. Steel Valley purchased Maryland Refractories last fall from Bob Oxnard. Janet Fraley, VP Administration, will be the official representative to TRI. Rutgers Student Recipient of TRI Scholarship Joseph Pantina, an undergraduate pursuing a B.S. in materials engineering at Rutgers, has been awarded a $5,000 scholarship by The Refractories Institute. He joins two students from Alfred and Rolla who have received scholarship awards this academic year. The Institute Board of Directors has approved continuing the scholarship program for the 2008-2009 year. Information will be disseminated to targeted schools early this spring. Hold the dates! The TRI Spring Membership Meeting is scheduled for June 4-6, 2008 at The Homestead in Hot Springs, Virginia. We are in the final stages of putting together the program. Registration materials will be forthcoming in early March. Also, the Fall Meeting is tentatively scheduled for Thursday and Friday, October 9-10, 2008, at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Coraopolis. The dates have been chosen to coincide with the end of the MS&T 2008 meeting which is being held in Pittsburgh that same week. REGULATORY The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), an affiliate of the World Health Organization, will revisit its assessment of the suspected carcinogenicity of crystalline silica as part of a new effort to review and update monographs on one hundred agents. The document “Volume 100” will contain fewer details on each agent than typically found in other monographs, but there supposedly will be no reduction in scientific accuracy or quality. IARC has tentatively scheduled a working group meeting which will include crystalline silica, among other substances, for March 2009. Total text for each agent is expected to range from 5-30 pages. For information on the IARC process, you may visit: http://mongraphs.iarc.fr/. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has also increased its focus on crystalline silica exposures in the workplace. While work slowly proceeds on a proposed health standard for silica, that agency has reinvigorated its Special Emphasis Program (SEP) for Crystalline Silica which was originally put in place in 1996. This means that employers can expect more inspections specifically related to silica and increased agency emphasis in training and exposure reduction. Experience with the initial SEP for silica found that roughly a third of workplaces inspected for silica exposure were exceeding the current permissible exposure limit (PEL) of 0.1 mg/m3. Future Watch: Report Forecasts $1 Trillion Carbon Market by 2020 The United States will be home to a $1 trillion carbon emission market by 2020 if federal and state policymakers continue on their current path toward a comprehensive “cap and trade” program that is confined to domestic trading only, according to an analysis released by New Carbon Finance on February 14, 2008. “Cap and trade” scenarios would issue permits to sources of carbon emissions. Facilities that exceed their permitted emissions levels would have to purchase credits from other sources that are below their allowable emissions. Such programs are in place in Europe and some other parts of the world. Currently, carbon offsets are trading internationally at $10-20 per ton. However, most of the proposed legislation put forth in Congress would require that any U.S. program be confined to domestic trading. New Carbon Finance believes this would result in charges of about $40 per ton, which the study projects would increase electricity costs roughly 20%, gasoline 12% and natural gas 10%. Presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain is a co-author of the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act which aims for a 60% reduction in carbon emissions from 1990 levels by 2050. Democratic candidates Senators Clinton and Obama both support cap and trade schemes that would seek an 80% reduction in the same period. And employers can get a better feel for just how much by accessing the “Safety Pays” feature on the OSHA website. Go to: www.osha.gov/dcsp/smallbusiness/index.html. Click on the “Safety Pays” icon on the right center of the page. The tool helps calculate the costs of job related injuries and illnesses and their estimated impact on profitability. LEGISLATION Stimulus Package Business Provisions The economic stimulus package signed by the President contains two tax incentives for investment. First is expandeded expensing (Sec. 179) for small business. Companies that purchase less than $800,000 of capital assets in a year can now expense the first $250,000 of capital investment for purchases made in 2008. Those limits used to be $510,000 and $128,000, respectively. The new law also includes a 50 percent expensing allowance (aka bonus or accelerated depreciation) for equipment purchased and placed in service during 2008 for all companies, regardless of size. There are some restrictions. Check with your accountants. SEMINARS & CONFERENCES Robert Morris University Center for Applied Research in Engineering and Science (CARES)
(Note: CARES Director Zbigniew Czajkiewicz spoke at the TRI Fall Meeting) Forty-Fourth Annual Symposium on Refractories
“CSI Refractories” |