The chemical plant manufacturing titanium dioxide, which is a subsidiary of Titanium Investment LLC in the town of Armyansk in the northern part of Crimea, has been given permission to resume operation after it was halted in early September due to a release of harmful emissions into the air from its acid holding basin.

"Employees of Rosprirodnadzor [the Russian Federal Service for the Monitoring of the Use of Natural Resources] on October 20 participated in the procedure to re-start the production facilities of the Titanium Investments plant," the press service of its Crimean department announced in a statement on October 22.

Earlier, the Armyansk subsidiary of Titanium Investments LLC developed a roadmap to clean up the territory affected by air emissions around the plant and restore the production facilities into operation so that the negative impact on the environment could be minimized.

The environmental situation in Armyansk deteriorated in late August. As a result, local residents started to complain on social networks about the acidic smell in the air, sore throats, skin rashes, and yellow film resembling rust covering metal objects. Leaves on the trees turned yellow and fell down ahead of time. People cited evaporation from the acid holding basin of Titanium Investments' subsidiary as one of the reasons for the emissions. The authorities in Crimea announced that the maximum exposure limit of sulfur dioxide was exceeded in the early hours of September 4 and halted production at the chemical plant. From September 8 to 9 all the eight furnaces at the plant were brought to a halt.

The state of emergency in Armyansk and nearby villages was called off on September 23. A criminal investigation followed to investigate the violation of the rules of the use of environmentally hazardous substances and waste.

Waste from the production facilities of the plant has been dumped into the water settling basis since 1970s. The area of the technical basin is 42 square km. It can store up to 30 million cubic meters of water. The acid holding basin became shallow earlier this summer because of hot weather.

Titanium Investments LLC (Moscow) was registered in June 2014. In summer of that year the facilities of the Crimean Titan plant (Armyansk, Crimea) were handed over to it on a long-term lease. According to the information from the analytical system SPARK-Interfax, Titanium Investments LLC is owned by Cyprus-based Letan Investments Limited. The company is also known as the founder of the Austrian holding company Group DF International GmbH that belongs to Ukrainian businessman Dmytro Firtash.