visit with minmet in newscastle

Friday, finally had a chance to visit the plant there and on no notice, managed a quick tour of the plant. I don't really think Selenium production was my interest; more the chance to find out why the profit downgrade in recent times. As you know we import waste from Canada, Finland, or was it one of the other Scandinavian countries, and a few other places. Selenium and a few other obscure elements/minerals are extracted and either returned to the owners or sold on from here. By products such as copper sulphate are sold on here to co's such as Perilya for treating their ores. Residues containing gold and other metals are passed on. All very boring really, and as I had missed the director's lunch, I moved on before too long. Now the reason for the downgrade, of course, had nothing to do with this plant. Seems the price of lead has dropped dramatically over the last 6 months or so, and, the cost of buying lead batteries has escalated just as dramatically. So the suggestion is that the Woolloongong plant may be caught with a stack of high priced batteries, and the return is not going to be the same. So all the fault of the battery people. Lead in the saddlebags; now there's a saying that could catch on. Still paying a dividend; I think. Cheers jwt