Covia open house at the Nepheline Syenite mine.

• Posted on 7 October 2024
• By Michael Leonard
• Posted in Mine, Nepheline Syenite, raw materials
• 0

Recently, we had the privilege of attending the 10th annual Covia open house at the Nepheline Syenite mine site.

Recently, we had the privilege of attending the 10th annual Covia open house at the Nepheline Syenite mine site. Our assumption was that it would be a half hour tour of a warehouse, with consummate hand shakes, small talk and coffee and donuts. The experience was far from that.

Covia extends this opportunity annually to the residents of Kasshabog Lake essentially for a “transparency review”. They update locals on their progress with regards to helping the environment, noise and dust pollution, and have an open forum for questions and accusations. The tour lasted 3 hours, and included roughly 100 residents in our “day two” experience. There was a slide show that addressed everything from what nepheline syenite is, to who their customers are, to the metrics they use to track their progress with regards to improving environmental concerns.

Some of the fascinating things were learned were:

They harvest roughly 200 turtle eggs annually, incubate them, and release the newborns safely back into the wild.

A birdwatching club is granted free access to the mines quarterly, to spend hours looking for endangered species, and last year, they found a nest of peregrine falcons, and that section of the mine was cordoned off until the falcons had grown to juniors and left the nest.

Truck traffic between the two plants (nearly 7 kms apart) is monitored such that they have determined it to be the greatest creator of dust and have therefore minimized processing at one plant and maximized it at the other to control dust creation.

Various ponds are also in place to help with dust control.

The mining process involves the least amount of explosives possible - the goal is to sliver off large chunks of rock, move it to grinders that reduce it’s size, then to another grinder, then to a tumbling dryer to remove moisture, and lastly to grinders that reduce it to sand or powder forms for the various industries it serves.

As for industries, while nepheline syenite is an important melting agent in glass products and glazes, it’s larger industries include: sand for pool filters, grit in cleaning products such as Vim cleanser, abrasive in some brands of toothpaste, and various other high volume industrial applications.

A fascinating article on the beginnings of the mine, the prospector that originally found it, and how he managed to market the product to Hamilton Glass, never mind the transportation and shipping issues can be found here on the Kasshabog Lake residents association site.

If you ever get a chance to check it out, this was a fascinating “field trip” to one of the very few mines in Canada that services our industry :)

Michael