Located in Piet Retief, a small town situated in Mpumalanga province, South Africa, Eskay Crushers was founded some 60 years ago by Bob Hawker, initially producing a meagre 6 m³ of aggregate per week. Robert and Phillip Hawker, the two sons of the late founder, took over from their father in the early 70s, building the business up to its current status.
Speaking to Quarrying Africa, MD John Davis relates how, in the founding days, a construction contractor, the only client at the time, would come to fetch a single 6 m³ truck load of material every Monday.
Over the years, the business has grown gradually to become the formidable quarry operation it is today. This is despite the fact that it is located in a very small town with very limited and cyclic construction activity. One of the defining moments in the history of the quarry, says Davis, was when it clinched a contract to supply material for the construction of a major railway line within its vicinity. In fact, that contract funded the construction of the current processing plant back in 1982. Over the years, the plant has been upgraded to improve both production and efficiency.
Talking point
The major talking point, however, is how Eskay Crushers is setting the bar high in terms of compliance, not only in health and safety, but also in environmental management. To provide context, the operation was among the top four quarries in the 2023 ISHE Audit, a stringent annual health and safety audit conducted by surface mining association, ASPASA. With a 95,88% score, Eskay Crushers ranked fourth in the 2023 ISHE Audit.
In the same year, the operation was named the Top Independent Performer in the online Environmental Audit, highlighting its commitment to environmental management on site. In fact, Davis received the auditor’s award for Outstanding Environmental Commitment, recognising his efforts in advancing environmental compliance.
For Davis, however, compliance is not about scores; it is about creating a safe working environment that allows every worker to return home to their families unharmed every day. Equally, environmental management is not just about creating a favourable environmental profile, but more about building a legacy for the next generation.
“I commend ASPASA for its efforts in helping us with our compliance management. Under the association’s guidance, the industry has upped its game in terms of compliance. For me, however, our efforts over the years are not about scoring a high mark in the audit; it is more about ensuring continuous improvement. Every year, we recognise our shortcomings and try to improve on that. Our achievements in recent years are a culmination of these small, continual improvements,” he says.
While the operation is passing the compliance test with flying colours, Davis says that compliance by its very nature is not without challenges. Compliance can be expensive, he says, more so for a small operation of Eskay Crushers’ stature. All operations, irrespective of size and operating profile, must adhere to a variety of rules and principles. Having to play on the same playing field as the bigger players and the mainstream mines with a bigger purse can be challenging, but it has to be done.
“Although we are doing it according to the lawbook, I believe there could be better ways to make safety easier to implement. However, I understand why the regulator makes it complicated to comply; the overarching intent is to ensure that we create a safe working environment to achieve the industry’s quest for Zero Harm,” says Davis.
Key contributors
Central to Eskay Crushers’ safety and environmental excellence is a team that shares a common goal and has embraced the need to work safely all the time and to be environmentally compliant. “We promote a team ethic across our operation. We treat each other with dignity and respect, which is key for us to work pulling together towards a common goal. Without the team, we would not be able to achieve what we have achieved,” he says.
Continuous improvement is the name of the game for Eskay Crushers, which is important in helping the team identify weaknesses, improve processes and enhance innovation and efficiency, while maximising employee engagement.
In addition, competence within the team is critical. Competencies can help employees identify areas for improvement and advance all areas of the business. To ensure a competent workforce on site, management at Eskay Crushers places a high value on continuous on-the-job training for its 26 workers and a few contractors on site. Continuous training, he says, helps employees improve their skills and knowledge, which can lead to higher performance levels. The quarry also makes use of knowledgeable consultants, who fill some of the crucial knowledge gaps and form an integral part of the Eskay Crushers team.
Commenting on some of the initiatives implemented on site, Davis makes special mention of the unrelenting focus on proper documentation, a parameter which sounds basic but is one of the true cornerstones of good compliance practices.
“One of the major initiatives we are busy with on the health and safety side is trying to bring our work in line with the written procedures or vice versa. In many cases, operations end up with procedures that state one thing and people doing it in a different way,” says Davis.
On the environmental side of things, Davis says one of the focus areas has been alien vegetation control, which is continual by its nature. Controlling alien vegetation in mines and quarries is important because invasive plants can threaten biodiversity, water resources and the environment.
The other focus area is water management and, in particular, stormwater control which, due to the quarry being on a slope that starts right at the top of the operation and ends in the Mkhondo River, is of vital importance. Waste management and rehabilitation of disturbed areas are other key focus areas of the environmental management plan.
Community relations is another big focus area for Eskay Crushers. The quarry strives to forge close relationships with its immediate neighbours and works hard to implement its social and labour plans. This, says Davis, is no easy feat, but remains work in progress.
Operations
Eskay Crushers mines and processes a competent granite rock. One of the key challenges on site is the complex geology – the rock is a granite-quartzite mixture with many intrusions, which makes it difficult to blast. Unlike a dolerite rock which turns out to be blocky and fragments well during blasts, the type of rock at Eskay Crushers has weathered top layers and complex jointing sets, which lead to loss of energy during blasts, resulting in poorer fragmentation, characterised by big boulders.
One of the interventions in recent times has been the appointment of a blasting contractor that brings a wealth of knowledge to blast effectively in the face of the challenging geology. “In addition, we have adjusted the size of the burden to hole diameter ratio, spacing to burden ratio, stemming length to burden ratio, and ultimately the charge/powder factor, which is the relationship between the explosive and the rock mass. These all have a big effect on the level of fragmentation,” explains Davis.
The challenge, however, is to get the right balance between these blasting techniques and some of the recent blasting requirements from the regulator to ensure safety. For quarries, one of the biggest challenges is their proximity to communities and existing infrastructure. In line with the requirements of South Africa’s Regulation 4.16(2) of the Mining Health and Safety Act’s Explosives Regulations of 2018, quarries need to acquire a licence to blast within 500 m of structures.
“We have recently done one Code of Practice (COP) for minimum standards on ground vibration, noise, airblast and flyrock near surface structures and communities. To some extent, we find these requirements to be counter-productive to good fragmentation. There is almost a trade-off between fragmentation and health and safety, and the latter has to win. We are continuously fine-tuning our blasting parameters to ensure that we can still achieve good fragmentation while meeting these requirements,” says Davis.
Plant upgrades
Eskay Crushers operates a very complicated plant. To provide context, the secondary and tertiary parts of the plant alone have a total of five crushers, five screens and 24 conveyor belts. This, however, allows the team to produce a range of products with ease.
Generally, the quarry produces various sizes of washed roadstone – 7 mm, 10 mm, 14 mm and 20 mm. This is complemented by normal concrete stone in various sizes – 20 mm, 26 mm and 37 mm. In addition, the operation produces different sizes of crusher run such as G1, G2, G4, G5 and G7, as well as handstone for gabion baskets and ballast for railway lines. On average, the quarry currently produces about 8 000 tonnes per month (tpm), which can be pushed up to about 30 000 tpm when demand is high.
Having initially been installed in 1982, the plant has benefited from major upgrades in recent times. For example, the team installed a Trio 12×52 granulator secondary crusher in recent years, as well as an Osborn SBS 38H gyro tertiary crusher. In addition, a new vertical shaft impact (VSI) from Techroq has just been installed to improve the shape and quality of the product.
The quarry is also currently busy with the installation of a new primary crusher, an Astec 3042, which replaces the old Astec (previously Osborn) 2536 which was installed in 1982. Davis commends the durability, simplicity and resilience of the Astec offering, which has served the company well for over 40 years with no issues.
“As a result of these plant upgrades and fine-tuning of the existing plant set up, we have been able to increase our plant production capacity from 100 tph to 150 tph. With the addition of a new primary crusher, we expect to ramp up to 200 tph. The idea is to increase our tonnes per hour – which allows us to work the same hours but produce more. Apart from increased productivity, this offers the benefit of reduced input costs related to wear and tear and electrical costs,” concludes Davis.
