The Kingdom of Fife is reviving its royal roots as ScotAsh, the Kincardine-on-Forth based Œgreen cement company, was presented with Scotland's only Queens Award for Enterprise2008 in the Sustainable Development category.

The Queen's Award was handed over by the Lord-Lieutenant of Fife, Mrs Margaret Dean, on Friday June 13.

This Queen's Award - the UK's most prestigious business award - is the second ScotAsh has won in the last three years. The company received a Queen's Award for Innovation in 2005.

Recipients are given a scroll signed by Her Majesty the Queen and the Prime Minister, as well as a crystal bowl, and company representatives attend a reception hosted by the Queen at Buckingham Palace.

Although ScotAsh operates mainly in Scotland, it makes a specialist grout that is used in the linings of oil wells, which is exported to the oil industry worldwide.

The company recently shipped a consignment of grout to Singapore for Tuboscope, where it will be used in oil pipelines, between the steel pipe and its fibre plastic lining - this assists the flow rate by keeping the oil warm.

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ScotAsh also exports cenospheres to various countries, including the Czech Republic.

New contracts in the pipeline include the Airdrie to Bathgate rail link and supplying materials for the new Velodrome, to be built for the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games.

Last year ScotAsh sold 1.1 million tonnes of products, including cements, grouts and stabilisation materials, smashing all previous records.

By using power station ash from Longannet and Cockenzie power stations as their raw material, ScotAsh conserves virgin aggregates, avoids the need to dispose of ash to landfill and saves significant quantities of CO2 by displacing carbon intensive Portland Cement.

During the last five years ScotAsh has sold more than 3.5 million tonnes of ash-based products, saving more than 3.5 million tonnes of primary aggregates, 180,000 tonnes of CO2 and diverting more than three million tonnes of ash from landfill.

Over the same period the company has doubled its turnover, quadrupled profit, halved its energy consumption per tonne of product and reduced waste from more than 300 tonnes per year to under nine tonnes in 2007.

Presenting ScotAsh with the Queen's Award, the Lord-Lieutenant of Fife, Mrs Margaret Dean said: "When I presented you with a Queen's Award for Innovation in 2005, I said you were a company that ticked all the boxes, in your striving towards a greener world.

"In an impossibly short time you have found even more boxes to tick in gaining another award, this time for sustainable development. I find it reassuring and uplifting that a company with ScotAsh's green credentials can also be hugely successful in the marketplace."

ScotAsh chairman Ron Hunter, also ScottishPower's Director of Business Services, said: "Clean coal will play an important part in meeting Scotland's energy needs into the future and continuing to make the best possible use of ash by-products through ScotAsh is a key feature of that plan."

(GK/JM)