WA Kaolin Conquers Its Dust & Dirt

Updated on Tuesday, July 9, 2024

Mining

Client Introduction

WA Kaolin’s wholly-owned Wickepin Kaolin Project is located in the farming district of Wickepin. It is 3 hours Southeast of Perth in Western Australia. Rio Tinto originally owned it. This world-class resource at Wickepin is one of the largest known remaining premium primary resources of kaolin globally.

Kaolin is used in various applications across numerous industries, including paper and plasterboard, ceramics, fibreglass, paints and coatings, plastics, rubber, pharmaceuticals and medicine, cosmetics, concrete construction materials and agriculture.

The Challenge

WA Kaolin is ramping up its site and are in the process of constructing “The Big Shed”, as the locals call it. The Big shed will house the equipment to process, dry and bag the product. As the name suggests, the shed is massive and can be seen from afar against the wheat and sheep landscape. Matt Baker is leading the team of fabricators setting up this site. He contacted ASC’s WA Manager, Ross Sheehan, to demonstrate a sweeper. He was looking for a machine that was capable of keeping the shed floor clean of dirt and dust. This dust and dirt were brought into the shed by the traffic. He wanted the sweeper to be able to handle the ultra-fine kaolin dust when the production would startup.

The Solution

Ross loaded the ASC Eureka M6 sweeper onto the ASC purpose sweeper built truck from Wangara (Perth) and drove 3 hours to WA Kaolin.

Ross met the Kaolin staff and test-drove the ASC M6 sweeper around their site. They deliberately spread kaolin in all areas to prove the machine would work.

The M6 sweeper handled the dirt and kaolin very well with perfect pick up and 100% dust control. Kaolin trialled other brands of sweepers on-site. However, ASC performed the best.

The Result

Matt was impressed. He considered the different power options available for the ASC M6 sweeper (Petrol, LPG, Battery, Diesel) and settled on the 36V heavy-duty battery-electric version. M6 was a stocked machine at the ASC head office in Sydney.

It was ordered and dispatched to Perth within a couple of weeks. While waiting on the arrival of the M6 sweeper, Matt ordered two of the ASC Eureka MEP dust-free push sweepers to help keep smaller sections clean.

Following a pre-delivery at the ASC Perth Warehouse, Ross delivered the M6 to the site and took the company’s operators through the process of using the ASC M6 to its full potential.

One of the operators (Ryan) took to the ASC M6 sweeper very quickly and had a grin all the way across his face as he took off to clean up the site.