Being able to carry out rock blasting safely and within acceptable environmental and societal parameters is one the biggest challenges quarries and smaller mines in close proximity to urban areas, face.

VBKOM has a few clients which, due to their urban location, have to deliberately constrain their blasts so as to avoid negative neighbourhood and stakeholder feedback.

Rock blasting made safer using plastic bottles

As part of VBKOM’s constant drive to optimise and innovate we recently came across a very interesting academic article where discarded plastic bottles were utilised successfully to reduce the total explosive cost by 7-16 % whilst improving fragmentation, reducing fly rock and reduced ground vibration.

With the bottled water industry being a large and growing global business and the fact that buried Polyethelene Terephthalate (PET) water bottles take more than 1000 years to decompose, we though it a good idea to share this environmentally friendly mining article with you.