How Dundee Precious Metals ensures its Tsumeb smelting plant serves the Namibian community with the utmost corporate responsibility
Dundee Precious Metals Tsumeb , one of three subsidiaries of the Canadian company Dundee Precious Metals Inc ., is the Namibian faction of the business . Its site in Tsumeb is located around 430 kilometres north of Windhoek – Namibia ’ s capital – and sits close to the nation ’ s greatest wildlife sanctuary , Etosha National Park .
Dundee Precious Metals built a smelter here in the 1960s , drawing on the rich seams of copper found in Tsumeb ’ s mines . Now , the plant contains two Pierce Smith Converters , a Top-Submerged Lance Ausmelt furnace , a sulphuric acid plant , and slag milling and flotation plant . 700 people are employed at the smelter – a significant portion of its 14,000 population .
The company originally began as
Tsumeb Corporation Limited , putting the Tsumeb plant into production in 1963 using the expertise of Newport Mining Corporation . It was soon producing over 3,500 tons of copper and 6,000 of lead a month ( until the lead smelter closed in the 1990s ), and the company went through a period of uncertainty as it changed hands several times and suffered a period of inactivity due to labour strikes .
The smelting plant was finally sold to Dundee Precious Metals Inc . in 2010 , with the TSL Ausmelt furnace quickly converted from a lead smelting vessel to a copper one . An oxygen plant was then added to increase the efficiency of the furnace , and the sulphuric acid plant followed soon after . The latter ensures that no harmful sulphur dioxide enters the atmosphere in the treatment process .
56 January 2017