Association “RusChlor” in cooperation with JSC “National Chlorine Safety Centre” and with the assistance of Ministry of Industry and Trade, Federal Service for Ecological, Technological, and Atomic Supervision of the Russian Federation, and Russian Chemists Union held on the premises of Moscow hotel Baltschug Kempinski on April 05 through 06, 2016 the Tenth Anniversary International Technology Conference “Chlorine and its derivatives 2016: Best Available Techniques”.

There have participated more than 140 people in the conference. They represented 78 legal entities of various kinds including the state-owned and private companies, governmental agencies, industry groups, trade associations, production units, engineering companies, and scientific organizations from the Russian Federation, Republic of Belarus, Republic of Kazakhstan, China, Germany, Italy, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Ireland, India, and Estonia.

The programme of the conference has been divided into the following three blocks of themes:

· industrial production of chlorine and its derivatives;

· the problems that are being encountered in transportation of chlorine;

· the raw commodities, equipment, and instruments designed to be used in the chlor-alkali industry.

As it has become quite customary for such RusChlor-held events, at the opening of the conference the audience was first cheered up by the musical greeting performed by Moscow virtuoso string quartet “Studio for New Music”. Then the conference began with the words of welcome delivered by President of Russian Chemists Union.

There were made out a few review reports on the first day of the conference by the representatives of Ministry of Industry and Trade, Federal Service for Ecological, Technological, and Nuclear Supervision of the Russian Federation, and Association "RusChlor". The reports were centered on the problems currently faced by the chlor-alkali industry, the state policy involving a change for governing the industry on the Best Available Techniques (BAT) principles, the normative legal regulation in the field of industrial safety, the current achievements and setbacks of the industry.

In conclusion of the first day of the conference the representatives of RusChlor made two presentations featuring the issue of BAT for the chlor-alkali industry and delivering the RusChlor’s performance report in the international activities for the year 2015.

There were mostly tackled the problems of bulk transportation of the liquid chlorine over rail and the ones linked to the modern equipment for the chlor-alkali industry on the second day of the conference. In so doing a representative of Department of the State Policy in regard to the Railway Transportation at Ministry of Transport of the Russian Federation lectured the audience on the state policy installed and enforced in normative legal regulation of transportation of the dangerous goods.

The modern-day technical requirements that should be met by the design of both the railway tank-car and tank container meant to be used in bulk transportation of chlorine over rail were meticulously analyzed in the presentation delivered by the Executive Director of RusChlor.

Under the roundup discussion in the end of the second day of the conference there was considered a task of designing such an innovative next-generation chlorine railway tank-car that should be a solution to all the problems felt in the bulk transportation of chlorine over rail. The discussion quickly evolved into a rather hot argument between the representatives of the producers of chlorine, designers of the equipment relevant to the case being considered, on the one hand, and the representatives of the government, on the other hand.