Displaying items by tag: Quarry

Germany: Lhoist has taken advantage of the alkaline soils around its Istein, Baden-Württemberg quarry in producing a range of six white wines, two red wines and a rosé under its Kalkweingut label. The grapes are grown on reclaimed sections of the quarry and harvested between August and October. The company says that the limestone ‘has a high nutritional value and retains the warmth of the Sun,’ which, in conjunction with the warm climate of South Baden, gives the wines a ‘Mediterranean’ expression.

Russia: Eurocement subsidiary Kavkazcement has announced its acquisition of a Hitachi excavator for use at its clay quarry. The reasons behind the choice of excavator were its high productivity and low operating costs.

Kavkazcement director general Oleg Lopatin said, “The hydraulic excavator will develop clay reserves in areas complicated by large slopes, increasing the economic efficiency of raw material extraction and ensuring the stability of the final product. Kavkazcement systematically modernises all stages of production, which allows us to guarantee high quality and reliability of product deliveries to key construction sites in the south of Russia.”

Canada: Haver & Boecker Niagara has launched a new service programme. Called PROcheck, the programme conducts operational analysis of screens used in raw materials processing. PROcheck reports to Haver & Boecker, which is then able to recommend to producers the best practices for raw materials processing proficiency. Haver & Boecker Niagara North America and Australia president Karen Thompson said, “By partnering with our customers through the PROcheck service programme, we are monitoring the efficiency of their screening process to identify potential problems early on.”

Thompson said, “We are experts at looking at the big picture,” “We engineer and manufacture both vibrating screens and screen media, and this gives us the insight to offer valuable advice producers won’t find elsewhere.”

India: The state government of Odisha has leased an area of limestone-rich land that includes the Asura Vihara Gumphas, a first century BC cult centre for the Jain religion that remains steeped in local mythology to the present day. The Blink newspaper reported that the site, consisting of three caves, is ‘covered by thick vegetation’ and in need of ‘proper conservation and preservation.’ Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) Odisha state curator Anil Tripathy said, ‘the caves should be retrieved from the company and the allotment of the site cancelled.’ Toshali Cements is reportedly carrying out limestone surveys on an area, including the caves.

INTACH is in the process of conducting a comprehensive survey of the Mahandi Valley, in which the land lies, and has identified over 1000 monuments of ‘tangible heritage.’

The Queensland state government in Australia took a blunt approach to health and safety earlier this month when a report it commissioned said that it expected 12 deaths to occur in the mines and quarries sector over the next five years unless changes were made. This is far removed from the usual news stories that industry magazines like Global Cement and others cover. Typically, these are either plants or companies reaching Lost Time Injury (LTI) milestones or sad (but thankfully rare) reports of death.

The forecast in Queensland was based on a review of fatalities in the sector that the state commissioned from Sean Brady, Department of Natural Resource, Mines and Energy, looking at the years 2000 to 2019. Year-by-year the figures were significantly lower than those occurring in the 1900 to 2000 period but didn’t appear to have any discernable pattern. However, when presented as a 12-month rolling sum of fatalities, a two to three year cycle seemed to occur. Brady then went on to look at how the fatalities happened, how the industry behaved and reacted and what could be done to improve the situation. His recommendations included looking more deeply at the causes of seemingly unrelated accidents and then changing overall organisational behaviour and insight through methods such as adopting principles of High Reliability Organisational theory, simplifying the reporting system and changing the standard safety indicators like LTI.

That last point is interesting given the prevalence of LTI indicators on corporate sustainability reports in the cement industry. The point that Brady cites here is that LTI can become a measure of how well injuries are managed, not how safely an organisation is performing. For example, the definition of what an injury is can be manipulated, leading to distortion, as can workers being brought back to work before they recover or into lighter duties. Instead he recommends that ‘serious accidents’ be used in place of LTI. These are defined as incidents that result in a fatality or incidents where an individual requires admission to hospital for treatment of an injury. The preference here is based on so-called ‘serious accidents’ being unambiguous and transparent because they are defined by a third-party medical practitioner.

Wider critiques of health and safety measurements have identified under-reporting of incidents arising from safety incentive programmes, safety culture, employee perceptions of reporting and workplace bullying. This isn’t to say that the LTI measure is not fit for purpose. It has undoubtedly led to higher safety conditions around the world, with reduced injury and mortality from working conditions, and it allows for comparisons between organisations. Yet, any health and safety metric or indicator could be liable to bias or manipulation either unconsciously or consciously. Serious accidents, for example, could be potentially undermined by an organisation having its own medical centre and would also suffer from different health care systems in different locations. Throw in different legislative frameworks around the world and comparing countries can also start to become confusing.

This tension between data and real-life safety is acknowledged by the Global Cement and Concrete Association (GCCA) in its sustainability guidance from late 2018. It distinguishes between so-called ‘lagging’ indicators, like LTI and fatalities, which show the effectiveness of a safety programme after the fact and the importance of continual safety improvement plans that aim to prevent adverse events before they happen. It is easy to become lost in a dust storm of facts and figures on health and safety but, as the Queensland authorities and the GCCA agree, measuring health and safety is a means to an end. The aim is zero harm to everyone involved.

Australia: A report commissioned by the Queensland Ministry of Mines has investigated the causes of all 47 deaths in mines and quarries in the state between 2000 and 2019, concluding that systemic, organisational, supervision or training failures caused the deaths in almost all cases. The report proposed that the state government should require quarry operators to use the Serious Accident Frequency Rate (SAFR) as their metric for health and safety monitoring, calling the Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate (LTIFR) unreliable because it is prone to manipulation, being “a measure of how the industry manages injuries after they have occurred. It is possible, therefore, to reduce the LTIFR without making the industry safer,” said the report’s author Sean Brady.

In the Australian 2019 financial year, ending 31 July 2019, six people died in Queensland’s quarries and mine.

Spain: LafargeHolcim España says that a planned Euro8m investment to its Sagunto integrated cement plant is dependent on talks with the Valencian local government on the medium and long-term use of its quarry. Plant director José Luis Coleto said that this expenditure is part of a Euro20m package that LafargeHolcim has scheduled for the country until 2022. He added that the plant has spent Euro3.5m on the plant in 2019 on control systems upgrades and installation of an automated laboratory.

US: Residents of Shenango, Pennsylvania attended a public hearing regarding Cemex USA’s plan to begin limestone mining at a 593 acre site in the township. New Castle News has reported that the proposal is part of a planned reopening of the company’s 0.9Mt/yr integrated Wampum plant, decommissioned in 2010 after 136 years’ operation, located nearby in Lawrence County. Cemex USA director of cement resources Mark Davies said that Cemex has plans that would generate ‘as much as US$109m’ for Lawrence County and Pennsylvania. Cemex’s legal staff advised residents that 100 new jobs and at least US$100m was at stake.

Sweden: The Land and Environmental Court has ruled in favour of Cementa for the renewal of its extraction licence for its quarry near the 2.5Mt/yr integrated Slite plant in Gotland. The company says that the decision ensures the continued operation of the cement plant. “We see this as confirmation that it is possible to continue limestone extraction without jeopardising water security or harming protected areas or species,” said Cementas CEO Magnus Ohlsson. “This gives us peace of mind and the chance to focus on future work in order to further develop sustainable cement production in Slite.”

India: Dalmia Bharat has successfully lobbied the Sundargarh, Orisha district government to request the inclusion of the company’s proposed 446 acre expansion to its Lanjiberna limestone and dolomite mine in the agenda of a village meeting in Kukuda, in which public opinion and suggestions will be recorded. The New India Express Newspaper has reported that, due to the special status of Kukuda as a Scheduled Tribal area, the village meeting forms a necessary preliminary step prior to district government permission of planned works. In October 2018, villagers in nearby Jhagarpur successfully blocked construction of Dalmia Bharat’s proposed Industrial Training Institute. The Lanjiberna mine will serve Dalmia Bharat’s 2.3Mt/yr integrated Rajgangpur plant, which was completed in 2019 at a cost of US$281m and awaits commissioning.