VILNIUS - Residential protests and fears of environmental damage may force investors to look elsewhere for a place to build their 87 million euro PET (polyethylene terephthalate) raw material plant.
The Nemuno Banga Group, Lithuania's leading plastic PET bottle producer, is prepared to make investments in the new plant outside the port city of Klaipeda in cooperation with Austrian investors, but residents have protested vehemently against construction of the chemical plant.
According to Arvydas Juozeliunas, CEO and owner of Nemuno Banga, the panic among residents of Rimkai, possible site of the factory, was the consequence of incomplete information.
Juozeliunas said in an interview to the Vakaru Eksperas daily that the group vowed to spare no effort to remove all residents' doubts so that the project could be launched.
However, he said that the group would not search for another construction site in the Klaipeda region should the attempts at soothing Rimkai residents prove fruitless.
"The list of contenders for these investments also showed Latvia and Hungary. We have a possibility to invest in Ukraine, too, yet we have opted for Lithuania," Juozeliunas said.
"However, if we fail to build the plant in the suburbs of Klaipeda, we will move the investments to Ventspils where we can complete all the procedures required during one month," he stressed.
Nemuno Banga management and plant engineers have provided all assurances that the facilities would be safe.
"Even under the most unfavorable circumstances - in the event of explosion at the plant - the blast radius would reach a mere 45 meters. The fire, if one erupted at the plant, would not spread farther than 50 meters," said Jonas Mulevicius, director of the Lithuanian Construction Design Institute, one of the plant designers.
The plant, which is expected to be completed by 2005, will be the largest ever investment in the region of Klaipeda and one of the largest greenfield investments in Lithuania after the restoration of independence.
The proposed plant will have a capacity of some 150,000 tons of raw PET materials.
