The Big Dig

When shy, reserved Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, she didn’t set out to start the modern environmental movement. Nor did she intend to give the mining industry a boost. Yet somehow, in her search for truth, Carson ironically managed to do both.

The mild-mannered but resolute biologist and author, who died in 1964, was by no means an advocate for the mining business. Carson grew up in western Pennsylvania, after all, witnessing first-hand the pillaging and plundering of a beloved rural setting by the coal- mining industry. Still, the influence of her landmark book improved the bottom line for certain segments of the mining industry, especially for one small, old company in North Georgia.

“That’s when we really started growing, the 1960s, after Rachel Carson got us all to start thinking about the environment, and respecting the Earth,” says Stan Bearden, vice president of operations at New Riverside Ochre Company in Cartersville. “There was this tremendous push and trend toward natural products. And we mine a natural pigment from the ground.”

Now 100 years old, New Riverside is the oldest ochre mining and processing company in the Western Hemisphere. Founded by William Satterfield in 1905, the company remains a family business, owned and operated by Jim Dellinger, Satterfield’s grandson. It is the only year-round ochre mining and processing operation, and the only producer of chemical grade barite in the nation.

Ochre, a natural iron oxide pigment that can be used to achieve a range of colors from brown to yellow, has been subterranean gold for New Riverside. It’s a cost-effective colorant in mortar, brick, roofing granules, concrete, paper, ceramic tiles, textiles, cosmetics, sealers, inks and paints. Ancient cave paintings were colored in ochre. So was the pottery of Paleolithic Indians.

Modern applications include golf cart paths, tennis courts, driveways, patios and sidewalks. Barite absorbs X-rays and gamma rays and is therefore used as a replacement for lead in shields for nuclear reactors and hospital radiology facilities. It’s also used as a -weighting agent for well-drilling muds and, as a source of barium oxide, for glass-making. Another iron oxide based element produced by New Riverside, umber, is used to color concrete and paints.

These minerals have geological histories that go back 300 to 600 million years. They are players in a roster of earth elements that make up Georgia’s mining industry. Across the state, 48 mining companies are working about 80,000 acres of mines, about 725 active mines in all, spread among 117 of the state’s 159 counties at the last reckoning.

As this article was going to press, the Georgia Mining Association was preparing to release its latest economic impact study. But according to records from the U.S. Geological Survey, in 2003 the production value of Georgia’s diverse mining operations was $1.67 billion, ranking sixth in the nation in the value of nonfuel minerals.

“This has become a sophisticated industry. It isn’t done with a pick and shovel,” says Georgia Mining Association Executive Director Lee Lemke, who wears a fie emblazoned with images of those famous pick-and-shovel miners from fantasy literature, the Seven Dwarfs.

There are many misconceptions about Georgia’s mining operations, Lemke says. For one thing, whether we’re talking about ochre or kaolin or titanium, it’s all pretty worthless when it’s extracted from the ground. “Beneficiation” is the term that encompasses pretty much everything that happens to a mineral after it’s mined, the washing and grinding, the magnetic separation, the removal of all impurities.

“We’re not talking about precious metals like gold, or something like oil that has value as soon as you pull it out of the ground,” says Lemke, noting that, of course, Georgia once was a hotbed of gold mining activity.

As for the sort of mining common in Georgia today, New Riverside’s Bearden says, “Ore is ore only if you can make money from it. Otherwise, it’s just a rock.”

That’s the argument Georgia mining firms have been making for years; one that has been successful so far. Georgia, known for having lenient mining laws, doesn’t impose a severance tax on minerals taken out of the ground. Almost every year, the subject of a severance tax comes up, and every time Georgia’s influential mining interests (think kaolin) are able to beat the rap.

Lemke, point man for the state’s mining industry, notes that Georgia employs at least 7,200 workers who are directly involved in mining, and they command excellent wages, averaging about $49,000 a year. Also, he adds, the industry’s economic effects trickle throughout the state indirectly, in the form of other jobs and businesses that in some way serve the mining industry. Take Austellbased Yancey Brothers, for example, purveyors of heavy construction equipment.

“Anyone involved in mining is probably using heavy equipment,” says Jim Stephenson, president of Yancey Brothers. “And the heavy equipment demands parts and service, a labor intensive part of our business. In our company, I’d say that we probably have 75 to 100 people who wouldn’t have jobs with us if the mining industry wasn’t there. I don’t know that we supply every mining operation in the state, but we try to.”

Stephenson says mining companies represent 10 to 15 percent of his business. “A substantial piece,” he says. “Not all of that is strictly mining. When those companies are done mining and get into reclamation, they have to use equipment. So the way I see it, our company benefits from their efforts, coming and going.”

According to National Mining Association estimates, the combined direct and indirect economic impact of mining in Georgia is $13 billion.

From The Ground Up E.P. Earle, a mineral broker from New York City, recognized the valuable yellow streaks of iron oxide in the banks of the railroad cut as he made his way through Bartow County more than 100 years ago. He had been importing his ochre from Peru, but discovered the Georgia ochre to be far superior and built a plant in Emerson, near Cartersville.

This is the same E.P. Earle who helped develop and build the Empire State Building. He knew how to build skyscrapers, but didn’t know much about the tenacity of William Satterfield, who let Earle know that he was going to have some competition in the ochre mining game.

“According to the story, Mr. Earle laughed and told his associates not to worry, they wouldn’t be hearing from these upstarts again,” New Riverside’s Jim Dellinger says. “And damn if we aren’t the only ochre mining company left.”

Georgia law requires that all mines operate under government permits. Last year Georgia’s Environmental Protection Division issued 58 new mining permits. Under Georgia law, when a mine closes the land must be reclaimed, which means it must be rehabilitated for useful purposes, and for protection of surrounding natural resources. The three major steps of reclamation include: backfilling (waste rock, or overburden, is put back in the mine); grading (the backfilled area is smoothed and sloped to reduce erosion and promote stabilization); and replanting.

New Riverside has been a leader in other forms of reclamation. A few miles north of company headquarters on U.S. 41, on land that was once surface mined down to 100 feet, sits the busiest shopping district in Cartersville – acres of retail outlets developed by

Dellinger and his partners. It’s part of a grand plan that includes 2,000 acres of mixed-use developments in the future as New Riverside completes mining activity in that area.

Of course, the valuable minerals New Riverside is after are a finite source of income, as with all mining activity. They eventually run out. “The challenge is, because it’s finite, to get the best value out of the minerals,” says New Riverside’s president, Tom Deems. “The pressure is on to extend our reserves and diversify.”

But New Riverside is alone in its surface-mined field. Georgia’s heaviest hitters in mining, the sector with some of the most rabid competition and greatest challenges, are in the kaolin industry. The four member companies of the China Clay Producers Association (Engelhard Corp., Imerys Pigments and Additives Group, J.M. Huber Corp., and Thiele Kaolin Co.) dominate production.

Georgia leads the nation in kaolin (and fuller’s earth, used for kitty litter; and iron oxide pigments like ochre). But it’s kaolin that dominates the state’s mining activity, accounting for more than half (about $893 million in 2003, according to the National Mining Association) of Georgia’s total mining production value.

Kaolin is a fine, white, alumina-silicate clay used for hundreds of purposes. It gives paper whiteness and acts also as a Her, reducing the amount of expensive pulp wood. It’s used in paint, porcelain and insulation. It adds strength and rigidity to rubber, smoothness and stability to plastic. Safe to ingest, it’s used in toothpaste and medicine and cosmetics.

The story of Georgia’s powerful kaolin mining industry begins long before there were such things as plastics, porcelain, corporate restructuring, political influence or any of the other elements the kaolin industry is known for.

It begins 70 million years ago along the shores of a great ancient ocean that covered most of the planet, including southern Georgia. Sultry tropical soup saturated the coast that stretchedalong what is now called the Fall Line, from Columbus to Macon to Augusta.

Rocks at the Piedmont Plateau disintegrated, falling into streams that carried the key ingredients, feldspar and kaolinite crystals, out to sea, forming large sedimentary deposits. Millions of years, layers of earth and fossils, erosion, the evolutionary life cycle of rocks and we have kaolin, China Clay, white gold, a billion-dollar industry.

“It’s all about long-term evolution, millions of years of geological formations happening in the right place, at the right time,” says University of Georgia geology professor Paul Schroeder. Actually, he says that’s half the story. The other half has more to do with the tenacity and foresight the individuals who discovered the clay and its myriad uses.

But Georgia’s kaolin industry has seen better days. In recent years annual kaolin production (much of it shipped through the busy Port of Savannah) has fallen below 7 million tons, compared with, say, 1998, when more than 8 million tons were produced at a value of almost $1 billion. Competition from abroad, especially Brazil, and the substitution for kaolin of other competing minerals and high energy prices are generally to blame.

Energy costs, especially, says Sam Smith, president of Thiele Kaolin in Sandersville, the buckle of the middle Georgia kaolin belt. “The cost skyrocketed around 2000,” he explains. “We’re paying $10 million more a year for natural gas than we were back then, and our profits aren’t much better than prior to that period. And the energy cost is going up again next year.”

At the same time, he says, kaolin prices have been flat to declining over the past five to 10 years, making for uneasy times. Thiele has enjoyed a couple of good years recently, Smith says, partly because it shed some of its workforce, through attrition and retirements. “We’re not as down dramatically as we could have been.” The company has countered some of its kaolin woes with income from timber harvested from its lands.

Brazil has what Smith can only describe as “beautifull kaolin deposits.” The company tried to establish itself in Brazil, came close to cementing an alliance with one of the few firms ensconced in the Amazon basin, but nothing materialized.

However, one of Thiele’s competitors and Sandersville neighbors, French-owned Imerys, does have a presence in Brazil. Formerly involved in mining under the name Imetal, the company began acquiring major stakes in white pigments, first in kaolin then in calcium carbonate, with the purchase of Georgia Marble Company.

Calcium carbonate (ground marble or limestone) is considered one of the greater threats to Georgia’s kaolin product (particularly as a paper whitener), says Chris Boyd, director of operations for Imerys in Sandersville.

“Calcium carbonate is a whiter, brighter product,” says Boyd, who actually grew up in Sandersville. Calcium carbonate is also cheaper to produce and more plentiful than kaolin.

Earthly Matters

The reach of Georgia’s mining industry is long and hard. Georgia marble, exceptionally pure (mined in the area around Tate in Pickens County) is in the Lincoln Memorial, the National Air and Space Museum, the New York Stock Exchange. Georgia’s crushed stone industry, spread throughout the state, is responsible for producing the guts for many of our nation’s roads, highways and other public works. Georgia ships more than 80 million tons of crushed stone a year.

Georgia granite, found in the Elberton area (which bills itself as the granite capital of the world) is used in monuments, countertops and town square statues all over the nation and the world. A huge granite deposit – 35 miles long and six miles wide – supports an annual payroll of about $59 million, generating $174 million in sales with a total economic impact of more than $500 million, says Tom Robinson, president of the Elberton Granite Association. “Ours is a unique industry, because the end product is usually a personalized memorial that will be there for the ages,” Robinson notes.

Down in the Southeast corner of the state, near the Satilla River in Brantley County, about 20 miles from the ecologically fragile Okefenokee Swamp, is a truly unique industry, Georgia’s only titanium mine. More interesting, perhaps, is the singular result of the environmentalist versus industrialist struggle that took place because of it.

Titanium is a valuable white pigment used in products such as paints, plastics, paper, textiles and sunscreens. In 2002, when Australian firm Iluka Resources announced its plan to mine the area, Gloria Taylor sprang into action. Concerned that the potential effects of mining discharge threatened the 19 rivers and streams in the Satilla watershed, she formed Save our Satilla, or SOS. The grassroots effort she led resulted in an amicable relationship with Iluka, a constructive partnership between the company and local conservationists.

“We’re trying to create a new model here, and so far, so good,” says Taylor, who adds that continued vigilance is necessary, and there are still questions remaining over the protection of isolated wetlands. “The potential is there for a stressful situation, but we’re really working hard to keep the momentum going.”

Because of Taylor’s efforts, and those of the Southern Environmental Law Center, Iluka (which started mining operations in 2004) is trying to embrace a dual role of industrial entity and environmental steward. Annual donations from the company have helped create and fund the Satilla Riverkeeper.

The company has eschewed Georgia’s regulations in favor of self- imposed, more rigorous Florida laws and standards. And last year the company spent $1.5 million beyond its original investment of $40 million to create a mechanical water thickener system that allows the company to reduce water consumption by more than 50 percent.

“A positive relationship has developed through continuous dialogue,” says Matthew Blackwell, president of Iluka’s U.S. operations, based in Jacksonville, Fla. “For example, if the Satilla Riverkeeper has concerns, they can come to the site and talk to our people right away, and they’ve done so. We hope to be extracting titanium for at least another 20 years in Southeast Georgia, and to do that we have to be welcome in the community, not just as a good employer, but as good stewards.”

In its mining operation Iluka scoops up about 15 acres of topsoil at a time, keeping the two percent that’s valuable, and putting the rest back before moving onto the next 15-acre parcel. Along the way it’s planting trees on areas that have been mined.

Taylor, who was honored as Volunteer of the Year by the Georgia River Network, is keeping her fingers crossed and her eyes wide open. “They want more mines in the future and we have an agreement that if they plan to even get near the Okefenokee, they have to call us before any attempt is made,” she says.

“There’s a power imbalance, big business and money versus people with virtually no budget, but so far, they’ve treated us with respect. We know businesses are in business to make money, and we’re not trying to keep people from making money. Just holding them to a higher standard.”

Copyright Grimes Publications Jul 01, 2005