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Case study

Eramet’s GCO reduces road water usage by 85% with biological dust control approach

Grande Côte Opérations (GCO) in Senegal is the largest single dredge mineral sand operation in the world. Across 20 km of primary haul roads, more than 3,000 tonnes of material is transported every day.


Client:
Client
Grande Côte Opérations (GCO)

Location:
Location
Senegal

Challange:
Challenge
Water damages road infrastructure 

Use-Case:
use-case
haul road stabilisation and dust control

The mine is close to a local community, so there’s always pressure to do things better — reducing environmental impact and using less water are top priorities. 

 In 2022, the mining services team realised they were spraying over 242,000 litres of water per day on the roads just to keep road dust under control. They wanted to reduce water consumption, so the business proactively decided to test other options. One of the tests, a biological dust control method, reduced water usage by 85% and created a three-fold drop in dust fallout. Here’s how they did it. 

The pressure on water resources in WA mining

With a local community living nearby, the mine services team had to keep a close eye on air quality. And from a production point of view, any fines kicked-up from the road reduced visibility for the drivers and slowed down cycle time. 

At that time, the mining services team was using only ground water to control dust on very arid land. All of their water trucks were being run at maximum capacity, and they had even bought new trucks to expand the fleet and keep the dust down. 

As they increased the frequency of watering, they noticed another problem. 

“Once you apply water to a road, it evaporates and afterwards you’ve got no stability in that road infrastructure,” says Alex McHaffie, General Manager, Bind-X. 

“GCO has got some of the better road construction teams that I’ve seen across Africa, and they take a lot of pride in managing their roads the right way,” he explains. 

Losing fines from the road surface forced them to frequently re-lay the wearing course layer, trapping them in an endless maintenance cycle.  

Trialling bitumen emulsion and biological dust control

The team at GCO decided to trial different dust control options to conserve water and stabilise the roads.  

They had already tried bitumen-based emulsion products and were reasonably happy with the road stabilisation and dust control results. However, it’s expensive, especially to get the product into West Africa. And there were other challenges like shipping and handling bituminous liquids on site. From an environmental standpoint, there were concerns about the risk of water and soil contamination. 

Eramet had recently discovered a new, cleaner option — biological dust control — that had just won the Responsible Mining Innovation Challenge. This is a new method of dust control by Bind-X that binds the upper road layer, forming a stable cement-like structure in the soil. Made from a natural bio-based technology, it’s completely clean for the soil and waterways. Solidifying as hard as bitumen, it improves rolling resistance on the road surface, and dust fallout.  

They decided to trial the biological method on an extremely dusty 3 km section of primary haul road, and a smaller section of secondary road, over 3 months. The well-built road was laterite on top of a chert bed, built to handle heavy vehicles passing once every minute.   

They applied it two ways:

  •  Building it into the road surface
  • Spraying it on top of the existing road

The results

Three months later, the water trucks were no longer running at full capacity. The GCO team had reduced water use on the roads to just 36,000 litres on average per day — a 85% reduction.


“We drastically reduced water truck trips from three times a day to once every third day,” said Alex.


Also, onsite dust monitoring data showed a three-fold reduction in dust fallout.

18 months on, GCO now uses it routinely across the site.


“It had a huge impact on water usage,” says Alex. “Not to mention, they reduced chemical use on site, and reduced the ongoing cost to manage the roads.”


Because Bind-X’s biological product is a solid powder-based product, not a liquid, the operations team finds it easier to handle on site. And it eases logistics, too. Where they would ship two and a half containers, they now ship one container to treat a similar area on the mine.

Find out about biological dust control for your site

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