For 30 years, Local Mix has produced high quality construction materials for the industry and has since become a supplier of sustainable concrete alternatives.
Local Mix is a privately owned, vertically integrated construction materials company, which started servicing Geelong, in Victoria, and the surrounding region when it was established in 1971 by Trevor Richardson and other partners. From an initial concrete operation, the company has grown to include a fleet of concrete agitators, pumps, tip trucks, front end loaders, excavators, dump trucks, drill rig, scraper and fixed and mobile crushing/screening/wash plants. In 2006 Richardson became the sole owner of the company comprising of Local Mix Quarries and Local Mix Concrete. Richardson is the managing director of the company with sons Stuart, Steven and Mark, holding key positions in the organisation.
The organic growth at Local Mix has seen the company expand from being a purely Geelong district concrete company to now providing a wide range of quarry products, recycled concrete and mobile crushing services to its clients. Its locations and operations include concrete batch plants at Moolap and North Shore, concrete recycling, maintenance and administration at Moolap, a basalt quarry at Anakie and a sand and gravel resource in Moriac.
Local Mix prides itself on providing that extra bit of service that other concrete and quarry companies do not. The company has a large established client base of customers located in Geelong and regional Victoria. It has been quarrying, mobile crushing, and recycling construction and demolition waste in the Geelong region for 30 years, recognising the importance of producing high quality end products to meet customers’ requirements. It has developed both equipment and working procedures to ensure its customers obtain these benefits.
Local Mix’s relationship with Metso’s Lokotracks began with a Citytrack C80R jaw in 1998. To be more productive and reduce double handling during crushing, Local Mix purchased an LT100GPB mobile cone and screen combination plant in 2000 to support its quarry materials processing. A Metso LT1213 impact crusher was added to the fleet in 2008 to provide operational flexibility in the quarry, concrete recycling or contract crushing service offering.
Two LT106 jaw crushers were added in 2010 and 2012 to provide primary crushing operations with high crushing power and reliability. The new model LT1213S, with the larger screen box and on-board recirculating conveyor was delivered directly to its first contract crushing project in Melbourne. This latest purchase rounds out the fleet to five over a 20-year period of high availability crushing. When Richardson was approached to discuss Metso’s Lokotracks a few years ago, his response was that he had only ever bought “Metso mobile crushing equipment and will only buy Metso”.
In 1999, Richardson’s sons identified an opportunity in the re-use of their own concrete returns and clean cured concrete. They developed a simple process of managing these forms of concrete to extract the aggregates for re-use in their ongoing ready mixed concrete mixes. The cured concrete is put through a Metso LT106 jaw crusher and then a Metso LT100GPB cone crusher with a screen. These crushers break down the hardened concrete to provide a minus 14mm concrete run which can be reintroduced to the concrete batches as a complete run, screened into different sized products or sold as an individual product. The crushing process also enables the Moolap site to produce several Class 3 products for construction site materials. These products include 20mm brick, 20mm Class 3 concrete, 14mm Class 3 concrete as well as 14mm Clean concrete.
The returned concrete is treated via the reclaimer and coarse and fine aggregates are separated, re-stockpiled and blended with natural aggregates and siliceous sands. The water is harvested for batch water. Aggregate quality is clearly not an issue as the proportion of recycled aggregates in fresh concrete can be up to 50 per cent and used in concrete grades right up to 50MPa. The process has proven so successful that Local Mix’s Moolap site has arrangements in place with other local ready-mixed concrete manufacturers to receive their concrete returns.
This initiative has had many benefits for Local Mix’s business, the largest being environmental, thanks to the re-use of a non-renewable resource in the form of its aggregates. The recycling of the aggregate portion of the concrete continues through several cycles as the materials are reduced from 20mm down to fine sand in multiple process cycles. The recycled aggregate production reduces the carbon footprint and the crushing and transportation costs associated with normal quarry supply to a concrete plant. The life of Local Mix’s Anakie quarry and sand resources has been extended by years, simply by the reduction of new aggregate consumption. This, in turn, reduces the quarry’s ongoing development costs.
Tutt Bryant Equipment (TBE) is pleased to assist Local Mix with its ongoing parts and service needs. TBE is the Metso Lokotrack distributor for Australia. Visit tuttbryant.com.au/tutt-bryant-equipment/metso
Source: Tutt Bryant Equipment