U.S. REPORT Doe Run spending US$38 million to build new lead

A recycling facility that will recover lead from used automobile and industrial batteries, as well as other lead-bearing scrap material, is being built by The Doe Run Company in Missouri. The US$38-million capital investment project is under construction at the Buick smelter site near Boss, Mo. Doe Run, based in St. Louis, is North America’s largest and only fully integrated producer of refined lead metal. The new facility is expected to be fully operational this autumn. At full employment, the facility will have a workforce of about 105 and should contribute more than US$7 million to the local economy in salaries, wages, and goods and services. The company said the facility is designed to produce 60,000 tons of finished lead annually and to increase Doe Run’s production of refined lead from 240,000 tons to 300,000 tons per year. The company will employ state-of-the-art industrial processes and waste management practices to ensure environmental protection. Advantages of the recycling technology, developed by Engitec Impianti of Milan, Italy, to be used at the facility include: — The design of the crushing system allows whole batteries to be broken down, and each battery component to be separated cleanly; — Sulphur-dioxide emissions from processing the battery paste are reduced significantly; — Instead of neutralizing the battery acid with lime (which produces a waste sludge), the acid is converted into a pure form of sodium sulphate (9,000 tons of which will be produced annually, with application in the laundry detergent, paper and glass industries); — The reverberatory and blast furnace process produces a discard slag in a smaller-than-historical amount and will offer the opportunity to render the slag non-hazardous; — The process will produce about one-third the volume of hazardous waste normally associated with traditional battery recycling facilities (with the only hazardous waste produced being a discard slag, a glassy impervious material, that will be disposed of in a commercially licensed hazardous waste landfill); — As a result of the process, 5,000 tons of clean polypropylene are produced and can be used in plastic recycling. By recycling lead-bearing waste materials, the company said its effort will annually reclaim 60,000 tons of refined lead from 100,000 tons of used lead-acid batteries; 10,000 tons of used industrial batteries; and 10,000 tons of other lead-bearing materials. The need for recycling batteries should intensify in Missouri because of a new law, effective Jan. 1, that automobile batteries no longer can be placed in landfills. Doe Run is owned by Fluor Corp., which bought out its partner, Homestake Mining (NYSE), in the lead-producing business in 1990. Doe Run and its predecessors have been mining and smelting lead in Missouri for more than 100 years. The company said it began investigating the idea of a lead recycling facility in the late 1980s.