The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is extending a 10 million euro loan to PP Polesie JLLC (PP Polesie), a leading producer of children’s plastic toys in Belarus. PP Polesie is one of the major exporters of toys to Russia and is also actively expanding in the EU member-states including Germany, Italy and Spain.
Strengthening local companies and supporting their efforts to become competitive on regional and international markets is part of the EBRD’s current strategic priorities. These are defined as strengthening resilience, promoting integration and addressing global and regional challenges.
The loan will further strengthen PP Polesie’s balance sheet and introduce energy efficient technologies. The company is set to become the first Belarusian business supported by the EBRD’s Finance and Technology Transfer Center for Climate Change (FINTECC) program.
A grant available through FINTECC will help Polesie install, and put into operation by mid-2018, a 2.4 MW combined cooling, heat and power plant (CCHP), also known as a trigeneration plant – an energy efficient technology that is new to the Belarusian manufacturing sector. Trigeneration will allow the company to efficiently generate electricity, heating and cooling power for the production cycle.
The implementation of the project is expected to result in electricity savings of around 3,000 MWh per year, gas savings of 24,100 MWh per year and CO2 savings of 7,500 tons per year. An energy efficiency audit, which helped identify potential energy efficiency investment opportunities for Polesie, was funded by the Central European Initiative (CEI).
The EBRD’s FINTECC program is designed to promote the transfer of technologies that make businesses more resilient to climate change and are currently underdeveloped. The program, funded by the Global Environment Facility and the EBRD Shareholder Special Fund, operates successfully in 16 countries where the EBRD invests.
Since the start of its operations in Belarus, the EBRD has invested almost 1.8 billion euro in some 70 projects in various sectors of the country’s economy. These investments include 83 million euro in sustainable energy projects under the Bank’s Green Economy Transition approach. (Prime-TASS/Business World Magazine)
