Diamond aren't forever

Loads of ancient machinery is about to meet the scrap shear, which will also be destroyed.

Perhaps the world’s most interesting pile of redundant kit is about to meet a sorry end…

First discovered by German prospectors during the early 1900s, major diamond finds along Namibia’s Skeleton Coast in regions like Lüderitz subsequently led to the rise of thriving mining communities at the turn of the 20th century.

Given the high intrinsic value that diamonds hold, all state-owned Namdeb mining operations are governed by strict security protocols concerning how processed diamonds are transported to market. This means that all equipment going into any diamond mining area – whether it’s a dozer, a pick-up truck or an excavator - never comes out again.

However, given the scale of Namdeb’s operation (and CDM’s before it), this has meant that a massive stockpile of dead kit has steadily gathered at Namdeb’s various mining sites. Given that the operation at one stage was rumored to have the largest private earthmoving fleet in the world and it has been operating since the early 1900s, it is a reasonable assumption that there will be a lot of machinery to scrap.

Unfortunately, given the secret nature of the business, hardly anybody has ever been allowed in, and certainly not just to look at the machinery. We do know that a quantity of Sherman tanks, which originally had been supplied to the British army under the lend-lease scheme ended their days here as jury-rigged bulldozers, and that an assortment of German steam trains from the turn of the century rust side by side with several generations of haul trucks that replaced them. Stories abound of other rare breeds from the earliest days of the equipment industry, streaked red with rust and basking in the Namibian sunshine.

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Times are changing though - Recently Namdeb took the decision to clear the scrap, with South African company SA Metal, securing the contract to systematically recycle and process the materials on site prior to their release from these secured areas.

The task of cutting up these redundant machines and other materials is being tackled by two Cat 330DL hydraulic excavators fitted with boom mounted S340 scrap shears,

According to SA Metal’s Xavier Fazakerley the contract, which commenced in July 2008, is open-ended and expected to be ongoing for around three years. During this period, SA Metal expects to commercially process around 250 000t of material.

“This is one of the world’s most corrosive regions and metal items don’t last long in this environment,” explains Fazakerley. “This means that any scrapped metal items prior to the mid-1960s will have in most instances turned to dust long ago.”

The largest sizeable scrap metal source is located at Namdeb’s Uubvlei operation, situated some 10km north of the Orange River and stretching approximately 1km inland.

“This represents one of the world’s largest scrap metal stockpiles,” says Fazakerley. “In fact the scale of the operation is so big that the footprint of the site is clearly visible from space - a final resting place for worked out earthmovers, trucks and just about anything else.”