Mine yard scrap proves valuable

At the South mine of Inco near Sudbury, Ont., what began as scrap in the muck has evolved into big bucks in the backyard.

Armed with only a suspicion and the co-operation of their fellow miners, supplyman Michael Paquet and construction leader Fred Belanger prospected the South mine yard to discover a wealth of recyclable scrap steel, repairable equipment and refundable items.

“We had a hunch there was a lot of money buried out there, but we never realized there was that much,” Paquet says.

“We had 14 trucks go out of here with a load full of scrap steel. That gave us $19,000 to invest back into our recycling program.”

The two make up the mine’s scrap-in-the-muck team, and both agree that the heightened awareness of everybody at the mine is going to mean less waste in the future and enough cash coming in from recyclable material for the program to pay for itself.

“This all began as an attempt to remove discarded plastic pails from the muck,” he says. “The plastic pails and other foreign materials in the muck were causing a lot of problems farther down the line, particularly at the mill.”

During one month last year, the mine returned hundreds of plastic pails and collected a $500 refund from the supplier. The money was donated by the mine to a Sudbury soup kitchen.

The buckets of pennies fueled the suspicion of people such as Belanger and Paquet about what other valuables might be waiting to be picked up. The yard, with its stockpiled steel, equipment and parts, was a good place to start. “There wasn’t just the obvious stuff, the stuff that was piled up — there was material buried or half-buried,” Belanger says.

With the help of others, the two began by clearing a basin in the yard to use as a storage area for the scrap. They commandeered the forklifts during noon hours, when they were sitting idle, and spent the lunch hour picking up material in the yard.

“We got a lot of help from the people here,” Paquet says.

“They knew what we were doing, so everybody did their best to help out,” Belanger says. “When scrap came up from underground, the forklift operators put it in our storage area.”

With full co-operation from the yard and electrical bosses who identified equipment as repairable or scrap, the two unearthed buried steel, yanked half-buried parts out of the ground and piled the material in the scrap basin and in areas designed for repairable items.

Among the items found were scissor-truck platforms, half a load-haul-dump machine, half a jeep, a diesel locomotive, miles of vent pipe, steel rails and many in-hole drill rods.

The two thought ahead. A shaft-guide replacement project at the mine during the recent production shutdown would produce an estimated 1,700 ft. of steel guides, and the two made arrangements before the shutdown to ensure the scrap would be deposited in the yard basin.

Recently, the pile of scrap went to the highest bidder.

Tons of repairable material were sent to divisional shops. “Inco probably had all this stuff in inventory,” Paquet says, “but I figure that our packing it up and sending it away served as a reminder that it was there.” Although no value has been placed on the total amount of repairable material found in the yard cleanup, a sampling was carried out on just a few boxes of the material and parts.

“We came up with a figure of between $30,000 and $40,000,” Paquet says. “And that estimate is on only a small fraction of what we found.” Few times in their careers were the positive results of their work so immediately evident to Belanger and Paquet.

“It makes you feel pretty good when you can see, in dollars, that your efforts have been worth it,” Belanger says.

The project has done more than kill two birds with one stone; it has knocked off half a dozen.

“We make some money; we use the money to enhance the program; we clean up our yard, make the mills happy with less scrap in the muck, take the pressure off our landfill sites and, at the same time, spend less on disposal contracting,” Belanger says.

Both agree the best part of the project is that the savings will be ongoing, as opposed to being a one-shot deal.

With the money made from the sale of scrap, 10 new scrap boxes were purchased for the mine. In what Belanger and Paquet say is the best idea that came out of the project, the “lugger boxes” were purchased to fit on the railed flat cars used underground on all levels.

They used to collect the stuff on the flat cars, but the scrap had a tendency to fall off and loading and unloading was a problem. People now load the special boxes and then the material is brought to the surface for disposal, recycling or sale.

— From a recent issue of Inco’s in-house “Triangle” publication.