The QUARRY men
LAURENCE GALE MSc spends a day at Oakamoor Quarry with WBB Minerals. MICK HIGGINS is his guide
WBB Minerals is a multi- national provider of advanced industrial minerals to the world’s ceramics, glass, sports surface, foundry and construction industries. The company has operations in nine countries across Europe and over 6,000 customers globally, making it one of the world's largest suppliers of industrial minerals.
Each year the company identifies, extracts and processes around 11 million tonnes of material from extensive reserves of silica sands, plastic clays, kaolins, red-firing clays and dolomite. Backed by the strengths
and resources of their parent company, SCR Sibelco, WBB Minerals believes it is better placed than anyone to meet the immediate and future raw material needs of the sports turf industry through its Rufford and Pro-Sport brands.
With ever increasing performance criteria for sports pitches, both natural and artificial, it is essential that the products used in their construction meet stringent testing standards and conform to specified criteria for their intended use.
WBB Minerals have heavily invested in a research and development (R&D) programme in the UK, which includes a number of laboratories that can test, measure and monitor all the products they produce from their quarries both in the UK and abroad. The company operate from 10
manufacturing sites across the UK. From across the UK a range of sand grades are produced from medium- coarse to medium-fine which are used in top dressings, rootzones and bunker sands. A range of very fine sand grades are also produced specifically
for the equestrian market. Oakamoor quarry
produces sand for glass production, some construction sands, golf bunker sand, medium-coarse rootzone sand and sand for divot mix. Other speciality products are also manufactured here such as ground cristobalite and quartz, which can be used in investment casting powders, rooftiles, resin sinktops, plastics and polymers Oakamoor (Moneystone) Quarry is a large quarry, near Cheadle in Cheshire producing over 10,000 tonnes a week of high purity silica sand.
MY guides for the tour were Production Manager, Rob Vickers, and Mick Higgins, Sports & Leisure Technical Manager (UK). Rob is responsible for all the quarrying processes at the quarry, managing over 40 staff who operate and maintain all the plant involved in the production,
transport and refining of the sands.
The first task is to extract the sandstone material from site. This is done by ripping the rock using a large dozer, large dump trucks are used to carry up to 50 tonnes of material in one load to the refinery buildings. This is where the rock is crushed, screened, washed and graded. This sand can then be stockpiled for despatch or further processed using driers, kilns, mills, etc. A large proportion of sand
produced is used in the manufacture of glass bottles. These sands need to have a high silica content with very low impurities otherwise the glass produced will be tinted. To achieve this exceptional purity the sand is leached with hot acid then washed and stockpiled. For some industries even this sand is not white enough so here the sand is fed through high temperature kilns (over 1500o
C). This modifies the
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