Among many products, MGM supplied iron ore to the blast furnace steel plant in Piombino for years.
For this trade, we were regularly importing to Italy Panamax size vessels (about 80 000 metric tons) from India of iron ore.
The vessels entered the port of Piombino on large piers, able to host this type of vessel.
The discharging operations were, in those years, not fully efficient in terms of material loss on ground and separation capabilities.
Therefore, even though the imported iron ore was used in a wide part, there was a lot of fine granulometry of this material that was either falling to the ground or simply not usable in the blast furnace due to the emissions it would generate.
It was stored and never reused, resulting in a waste of money, resources and space.
Solution:
We purchased and financed the installation of new reloading cranes and conveyor belts that could fit in a smaller pier right besides the larger ones.
By doing so, we were able to collect, reload on smaller vessels, and therefore reuse the iron ore fines that were left there with no use in the steel plant.
The iron ore fines reloaded were redistributed to other industries such as cement plants as an iron corrector.
The solution quickly became a winner for every part.
This provided the possibility to the plant to use the smaller pier that was never used.
It removed the problem of losing space, money, and resources.
It generated an income for the steel plant.
They could rent the installations to reload any other type of vessel with other materials too.