Cutting down on dust

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Cutting down on dust

Extracted from The Star, 11^th April 2000

Welcome to RCI Resources Sdn Bhd, Malaysia’s most environmentally friendly quarry: it uses no explosives at all.

Located just beside the North-South Expressway (on the right side if you are heading north) at Simpang Pulai, Perak, RCI had to stop blasting to extract its limestone when the expressway was built so close to it.

Now, the quarry uses diamond wire cutters and huge chainsaws to extract marble instead (marble is just another form of limestone). The cutting process itself is largely dust-free because water is continuously sprayed to cool the cutting edges.

The downside of cutting is that it costs several times more compared to blasting. To be commercially viable, only large, high-quality marble blocks or high-quality limestone can be extracted this way as the can be sold at prices much higher than ordinary limestone.

Marble blocks are used for larger items like tabletops and kitchen countertops as well as tiles, all value-added commodities.

At RCI, marble scraps that cannot be sold as blocks are crushed and used as raw material for white cement that is used to make floor tiles, among many other applications; the white content is important because colour is added to the tiles in the form of speckles of other material. RCI also owns the country’s sole white cement manufacturing factory; it’s located at nearby Lahat.

However, RCI shares an uneasy existence with its neighbours; there are at least four other quarries adjacent to it, all sharing almost the same hill. “We may be cutting, but when our neighbours blast, rocks fall on our side,: laments quarry manager Cheong Fook Loy.

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