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Richards Bay Minerals
Richards Bay Minerals (RBM) is a South African mining company. RBM's principal product is titanium dioxide in the form of an 85% pure titanium dioxide slag; the company also produces the higher-purity 95% titanium dioxide product rutile as well as pig iron and zircon. The company's principal operations are just north of Richards Bay in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, in a 2-kilometer wide by 17-kilometer long strip of mineral-rich sand dunes. The area is known as Zulti North mine lease area and will continue to be mined until 2030. RBM mines the using a dredge mining technique, extracting the titanium-iron ore ilmenite as well as rutile and zircon from the sand. This feedstock is then processed into RBM's product lines at a facility which sorts the various materials and processes them to varying degrees into marketable materials. RBM is controlled by Rio Tinto which owns 74% of it. Blue Horizon Investments (24%) and RBM permanent employees (2%) also have an interest in the mine. Pr ...
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Provinces Of South Africa
South Africa is divided into nine provinces. On the eve of the 1994 South African general election, 1994 general election, South Africa's former homelands, also known as Bantustans, were reintegrated, and the four existing provinces were divided into nine. The twelfth, thirteenth and sixteenth amendments to the Constitution of South Africa changed the borders of seven of the provinces. History The Union of South Africa was established in 1910 by combining four British colonies: the Cape Colony, the Natal Colony, the Transvaal Colony and the Orange River Colony (the latter two were, before the Second Boer War, independent republics known as the South African Republic and the Orange Free State). These colonies became the four original provinces of the Union: Cape Province, Transvaal Province, Natal Province and Orange Free State Province. Segregation of the black people, black population started as early as 1913, with ownership of land by the black majority being restricted to ...
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Zircon
Zircon () is a mineral belonging to the group of nesosilicates and is a source of the metal zirconium. Its chemical name is zirconium(IV) silicate, and its corresponding chemical formula is Zr SiO4. An empirical formula showing some of the range of substitution in zircon is (Zr1–y, REEy)(SiO4)1–x(OH)4x–y. Zircon precipitates from silicate melts and has relatively high concentrations of high field strength incompatible elements. For example, hafnium is almost always present in quantities ranging from 1 to 4%. The crystal structure of zircon is tetragonal crystal system. The natural color of zircon varies between colorless, yellow-golden, red, brown, blue, and green. The name derives from the Persian ''zargun'', meaning "gold-hued". This word is corrupted into " jargoon", a term applied to light-colored zircons. The English word "zircon" is derived from ''Zirkon'', which is the German adaptation of this word. Yellow, orange, and red zircon is also known as " hya ...
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Mining Companies Of South Africa
Mining is the extraction of valuable minerals or other geological materials from the Earth, usually from an ore body, lode, vein, seam, reef, or placer deposit. The exploitation of these deposits for raw material is based on the economic viability of investing in the equipment, labor, and energy required to extract, refine and transport the materials found at the mine to manufacturers who can use the material. Ores recovered by mining include metals, coal, oil shale, gemstones, limestone, chalk, dimension stone, rock salt, potash, gravel, and clay. Mining is required to obtain most materials that cannot be grown through agricultural processes, or feasibly created artificially in a laboratory or factory. Mining in a wider sense includes extraction of any non-renewable resource such as petroleum, natural gas, or even water. Modern mining processes involve prospecting for ore bodies, analysis of the profit potential of a proposed mine, extraction of the desired materials, and ...
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Titanium Mining
Titanium is a chemical element with the symbol Ti and atomic number 22. Found in nature only as an oxide, it can be reduced to produce a lustrous transition metal with a silver color, low density, and high strength, resistant to corrosion in sea water, aqua regia, and chlorine. Titanium was discovered in Cornwall, Great Britain, by William Gregor in 1791 and was named by Martin Heinrich Klaproth after the Titans of Greek mythology. The element occurs within a number of minerals, principally rutile and ilmenite, which are widely distributed in the Earth's crust and lithosphere; it is found in almost all living things, as well as bodies of water, rocks, and soils. The metal is extracted from its principal mineral ores by the Kroll and Hunter processes. The most common compound, titanium dioxide, is a popular photocatalyst and is used in the manufacture of white pigments. Other compounds include titanium tetrachloride (TiCl4), a component of smoke screens and catalysts; and ti ...
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Surface Mines In South Africa
A surface, as the term is most generally used, is the outermost or uppermost layer of a physical object or space. It is the portion or region of the object that can first be perceived by an observer using the senses of sight and touch, and is the portion with which other materials first interact. The surface of an object is more than "a mere geometric solid", but is "filled with, spread over by, or suffused with perceivable qualities such as color and warmth". The concept of surface has been abstracted and formalized in mathematics, specifically in geometry. Depending on the properties on which the emphasis is given, there are several non equivalent such formalizations, that are all called ''surface'', sometimes with some qualifier, such as algebraic surface, smooth surface or fractal surface. The concept of surface and its mathematical abstraction are both widely used in physics, engineering, computer graphics, and many other disciplines, primarily in representing the surfac ...
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Rio Tinto (corporation) Subsidiaries
Rio Tinto, meaning "red river", may refer to: Businesses * Rio Tinto (corporation), an Anglo-Australian multinational mining and resources corporation ** Rio Tinto Alcan, based in Canada ** Rio Tinto Borax in America *** Rio Tinto Borax Mine, a mine in Boron, California, USA ** Rio Tinto Coal Australia, the Australian coal mining operation ** Rio Tinto Energy America, an American operation ** Rio Tinto Madagascar, a Madagascar operation ** Rio Tinto Tower, a building in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia Places Brazil * Rio Tinto, Paraíba Portugal * , a civil parish in the Esposende Municipality * Rio Tinto (Gondomar), a civil parish in municipality of Gondomar Spain * Rio Tinto (river), a river descending from the Sierra Morena mountains of Andalusia, home of the first Rio Tinto Group mine. United States * Rio Tinto, Nevada Other uses * America First Field (formerly known as Rio Tinto Stadium), a soccer stadium, in Sandy, Utah, United States, home to the Major League ...
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South African Rand
The South African rand, or simply the rand, (sign: R; code: ZAR) is the official currency of the Southern African Common Monetary Area: South Africa, Namibia (alongside the Namibian dollar), Lesotho (alongside the Lesotho loti) and Eswatini (alongside the Swazi lilangeni). It is subdivided into 100 cents (sign: "c"). The South African rand is legal tender in the Common Monetary Area member states of Namibia, Lesotho and Eswatini, with these three countries also having their own national currency (the dollar, the loti and the lilangeni respectively) pegged with the rand at parity and still widely accepted as substitutes. The rand was also legal tender in Botswana until 1976, when the pula replaced the rand at par. Etymology The rand takes its name from the Witwatersrand ("white waters' ridge" in English, ''rand'' being the Dutch and Afrikaans word for 'ridge'), the ridge upon which Johannesburg is built and where most of South Africa's gold deposits were found. In English and ...
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Ilmenite
Ilmenite is a titanium-iron oxide mineral with the idealized formula . It is a weakly magnetic black or steel-gray solid. Ilmenite is the most important ore of titanium and the main source of titanium dioxide, which is used in paints, printing inks, fabrics, plastics, paper, sunscreen, food and cosmetics. Structure and properties Ilmenite is a heavy (specific gravity 4.7), moderately hard (Mohs hardness 5.6 to 6), opaque black mineral with a submetallic luster. It is almost always massive, with thick tabular crystals being quite rare. It shows no discernible cleavage, breaking instead with a conchoidal to uneven fracture. Ilmenite crystallizes in the trigonal system with space group ''R''. The ilmenite crystal structure consists of an ordered derivative of the corundum structure; in corundum all cations are identical but in ilmenite Fe2+ and Ti4+ ions occupy alternating layers perpendicular to the trigonal c axis. Pure ilmenite is paramagnetic (showing only very weak attra ...
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Dredge Mining
Dredging is the excavation of material from a water environment. Possible reasons for dredging include improving existing water features; reshaping land and water features to alter drainage, navigability, and commercial use; constructing dams, dikes, and other controls for streams and shorelines; and recovering valuable mineral deposits or marine life having commercial value. In all but a few situations the excavation is undertaken by a specialist floating plant, known as a dredger. Dredging is carried out in many different locations and for many different purposes, but the main objectives are usually to recover material of value or use, or to create a greater depth of water. Dredges have been classified as suction or mechanical. Dredging has significant environmental impacts: it can disturb marine sediments, leading to both short- and long-term water pollution, destroy important seabed ecosystems, and can release human-sourced toxins captured in the sediment. Description ...
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Richards Bay
Richards Bay ( af, Richardsbaai) is a town in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. It is situated on a 30 square kilometre lagoon of the Mhlatuze River, which makes it one of the country's largest harbours. Richards Bay also has the deepest natural harbour on the African continent. History The town began as a makeshift harbour that was set up by Commodore of the Cape, Sir Markus Eugene Brown, during the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879. In 1902, Cathcart Methven, the harbour engineer for the Natal Government, in his ''Zululand Port Survey'' recognized the potential of Richards Bay as a new harbour for the eastern shore. In 1935 the Richards Bay Game Sanctuary was created to protect the ecology around the lagoon and by 1943 it expanded into Richards Bay Park. The town was laid out on the shores of the lagoon in 1954 and proclaimed a town in 1969. In 1965, the South African Government under Minister of Transport Ben Schoeman decided to build a deep water harbour at Richards Bay. Construction ...
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Pig Iron
Pig iron, also known as crude iron, is an intermediate product of the iron industry in the production of steel which is obtained by smelting iron ore in a blast furnace. Pig iron has a high carbon content, typically 3.8–4.7%, along with silica and other constituents of dross, which makes it brittle and not useful directly as a material except for limited applications. The traditional shape of the molds used for pig iron ingots is a branching structure formed in sand, with many individual ingots at right angles to a central channel or "runner", resembling a litter of piglets being nursed by a sow. When the metal had cooled and hardened, the smaller ingots (the "pigs") were simply broken from the runner (the "sow"), hence the name "pig iron". As pig iron is intended for remelting, the uneven size of the ingots and the inclusion of small amounts of sand cause only insignificant problems considering the ease of casting and handling them. History Smelting and producing ...
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KwaZulu-Natal
KwaZulu-Natal (, also referred to as KZN and known as "the garden province") is a province of South Africa that was created in 1994 when the Zulu bantustan of KwaZulu ("Place of the Zulu" in Zulu) and Natal Province were merged. It is located in the southeast of the country, with a long shoreline on the Indian Ocean and sharing borders with three other provinces and the countries of Mozambique, Eswatini and Lesotho. Its capital is Pietermaritzburg, and its largest city is Durban. It is the second-most populous province in South Africa, with slightly fewer residents than Gauteng. Two areas in KwaZulu-Natal have been declared UNESCO World Heritage Sites: the iSimangaliso Wetland Park and the uKhahlamba Drakensberg Park. These areas are extremely scenic as well as important to the surrounding ecosystems. During the 1830s and early 1840s, the northern part of what is now KwaZulu-Natal was established as the Zulu Kingdom while the southern part was, briefly, the Boer Nata ...
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