ODE Materials has been on an extensive journey within the quarrying industry to become a supplier of high-quality sand. Simone and Brendan O’Dowd share their story with Quarry.
How do you take a thought and develop it into a thriving business?
It is hard to know exactly how much of a business’s success lies in tangible factors like a well-structured plan, location or the right equipment and how much lies in the intangible.
Simone O’Dowd had a simple idea as she looked around her development site in 2012 in New South Wales.
More than two decades prior, the previous site owner had excavated about 20,000 tonnes of sand onto the site when trying to build a marina basin.
There was a quality resource sitting there, albeit one that needed screening and cleaning. Simone had an inkling that the sand could be sold into the construction market and to concrete producers.
Her initial research had shown that commissioning a contractor to process this sand would be too expensive to make it a worthwhile venture.
As she told Quarry, she would not let a simple thing like that stop her.
“I was convinced that it wasn’t rocket science. I refuse to believe anything in the world is rocket science except rocket science,” she said.
“In my whole career, I’ve always worked on a project that has required research and a lot of courage to step into places I hadn’t been before. It wasn’t new for me to do it again, except it was in sand mining this time.
“I decided if they could do it, I could do it.”
Driven by her internal belief and support from her business partner, Simone took her first steps on an extensive journey that would eventually grow into ODE Materials.
Simone visited four or five different sand processing plants to witness how they processed their material. Instead of potential competitors closing ranks, Simone found, for the most part, they were willing to support her as she began her journey in the construction materials industry.
Her best lessons came from the on-the-ground operators.
With what she learned from this research trip around Australia’s east coast, Simone and her business partner began to realise the potential for this company to flourish.
“If you show an interest in somebody’s job, they are generally very keen to talk to you about it. It doesn’t take much for me to get enthusiastic; I thrive on challenges enjoy learning new things,” she said.
“I think there was a sense from them that ‘well, she’s incredibly unlikely to get this up, we’re not really at risk’ because the chances of success were so minor.
“But I think that is a great testament to the Australian culture; we do give it a go, and we support each other.”
In December 2012, they decided to bite the bullet and invest $20,000 to hire a triple-deck screen from Finlay, a loader and another operator. Starting a new business is a substantial task for anyone, let alone someone who is also learning how to operate the screening equipment and the loader.
The initial 4000-tonne stockpile generated interest from Australian concrete producers but as a newcomer to the sector, they needed to see proof of the material quality and evidence it could be produced consistently.
Despite being a small start-up, Simone refused to be deterred and believed she had been presented with a great opportunity.
“Another person might have said, ‘this is too hard, they keep moving the goalposts,’ but I am not like that,” she said.
“No matter how small you start, if you get it right at the start that is half the battle won.”
The initial results of the sand encouraged her business partner to maintain their investment, while the likes of Heidelberg Materials Australia (Hanson at the time) and Holcim Australia were left impressed with the quality of the resource. Seemingly, they may have struck gold from the beginning, and sand production looked easy.
Until newly purchased second-hand equipment arrived, which proved to be the wrong equipment and an expensive mistake. Like many small-to-medium businesses, it was not flush with cash to spend on equipment without revenue coming back in.
Quick thinking on Simone’s behalf saw them rent the incorrect trommel out to a local council and use those funds to hire the correct equipment. It was not an ideal set-up by any measure. Still, it allowed the business to operate for a year and prove it could consistently supply sand, which secured its first two clients, a significant milestone for the business.
“I was about as low as I can get,” she said.
“But at this point, I had sand on the ground continuously and two customers, which wasn’t a lot, but it was continuous.”
Sometimes, when a person is going through a significant life event, it is only in hindsight that they can reflect on the enormity of their achievements. It is no different in business; specific years often feature ‘sliding doors’ moments that make or break the company.
Now, nearly a decade later, Simone has highlighted 2016 as the critical year the business shifted gears.
The original 20,000 tonnes of sand started to run out due to customer demand at the end of 2015, and while they had approval to make the marina basin bigger, they would need a dredge to do it. It was more effective than using an excavator to increase the basin’s size but also more expensive.
It was a conundrum that sent Simone to the drawing board. She set out to visit six dredge operators to find a contractor to support the business. Importantly, she also wanted to reconfigure the existing screening setup to achieve a better de-watering process for the sand material.
Brendan O’Dowd, the local track and manufacturing industry’s go-to for difficult jobs, helped modify their ancient mobile screen which had been recently purchased. The modification featured a boiler box at the top of the shaker box instead of rinse bars along the length of the screening deck and a box at the bottom of screen to the catch the now heavily-diluted slurry and transfer it to a second-hand Terex SC60 for dewatering.
“Brendan did the two modifications, and then we hooked it up, and it worked in the sense that I was dry-feeding the mobile screen, bombing it with water before it then dropped into the vibrating box and then transferring it to the SC60,” Simone said.
“But I was dumping a lot of water from the basin, not just sprinkling or rewatering it but pounding it with water and sending it through a cyclone and a dewatering screen.
“Not only had we built this system with all this old gear, but we’d modified it, and now we were making really nice sand. We had very rudimentary equipment, but we had no issues. Despite the fact it was rudimentary, we were meticulous in applying principles and the right parameters.”
The new system, built chiefly by Brendan, helped them process around 50,000 tonnes of sand over the next six months. Brendan’s work impressed Simone and her business partner to such an extent that they decide to sub-contract Brendan for one day a week, which in hindsight, was an important moment for both Simone and Brendan.
Together, they set out to master every function within their plant to produce the best in-spec sand possible. It sounds simple, but given they had created a continuous process from the dredge to the on-shore system, the reality was much harder.
The system itself featured a lot of second-hand equipment, some of which had to be re-built, and needed to function together as one unit. Brendan led the initiative to modify parts of the equipment so it could all function within the same parameters, which boosted their on-site production.
“Brendan absolutely nailed it,” Simone said.
“I regard 2016 as the year we developed significant expertise on what we call the operating parameters for every function in the plant.
“We were learning on the ground as we went. We began to understand the operating parameters for every bit of gear to the finest detail. Understanding those parameters is critical. If you don’t understand your parameters, you’re losing money.”
But, as with any business, while it was continuing to grow, they still had more things to figure out as Simone and Brendan continued to learn as sand producers.
The costs of commissioning a dredge and contractor were proving expensive and limiting to the business. The conventional cutter head extraction method was creating issues as the extraction area featured a clay seam running through it. The cutter head was unable to get through it, which presented a problem for the business.
They could either stop and pack up the business due to the clay seam or drastically re-think how they dredged their material. The answer came in the unlikely form of a Victorian dredge operator in Darwin.
Lex Nankervis from Slurry Systems Marine said he had a new method that would counteract the issues Simone and Brendan had encountered with the clay seam. It could even take the business to new heights.
“We knew the sand extended three to four times beyond the clay, but we were told there was nothing that we could do,” Simone said.
“I don’t like taking no for an answer, especially when I know it isn’t rocket science. When we saw this new dredge technology, we were like, ‘wow’, and we thought it could work.”
Not only did Lex’s setup work, but it also voided the use of the excavator, which had been on its last legs after being purchased second-hand several years earlier. Lex developed a system that put his dredged material through a screen to take out oversized material before the slurry was pumped in equal distribution to three cyclones on three-legged stands.
Simone and Brendan agreed the set-up looked like something out of the post-apocalyptic novel The Day of the Triffids, but it was effective regardless of its looks. Within its parameters, each cyclone performed optimally for its function.
“We were watching and observing at the time but not really understanding how critical it was what we were seeing,” Simone said. “We saw on occasions when one cyclone wasn’t getting enough material or the right pressure, we saw that the material it produced was inferior compared to the others.
“It was still as sloppy as heck, but we ran like that for 12 months, and it killed the loader, which was still having to move this wet material to the stockpile area.”
After their initial success with the new system, Simone wanted to bring the dredging in-house. She thought that getting it in-house would give them greater control and avoid a “stock out”, which could occur if they were waiting on external contractors.
After some research, travelling up to Queensland and working with nine separate parties to find and modify the equipment , the company had built a new electric dredge. All of this was packed into a timeframe from November 2017 to June 2018. Brendan took long service leave from his other job to help Simone manage the project. They constantly refined their design, overseeing the manufacturing of the pontoon and consulting with electrical engineers as they tweaked and altered the newly created dredge and shore-based processing plant.
Simone said “it was like the Christmas of all Christmases,” as they watched each semi-trailer roll through in February and March 2018 with the bits of gear which was assembled by Brendan. While still supplying and loading out sand, Brendan and Simone were putting their plant together under the curious and at times disbelieving eyes of their existing multinational customers. And within two days of final testing, they were approached to supply 8000 tonnes a month of sand. There were only two issues: the old second-hand Terex SC60 was nearly exhausted after years of operation and was being held together with conveyor belt rubber and Sikaflex. They had also reached the maximum size of the dredging pool and needed to shift the plant on-site to produce more sand while still making sure they had enough stockpiled material to supply.
But, as they had for the previous few years, Simone and Brendan refused to get knocked down by the enormity of what confronted them.
“We pushed this plant as hard as it would go to build this massive stockpile, which we could use while we broke down the plant and moved it,” Brendan said.
“We relocated the entire plant but took the opportunity to improve and refine it.”
Once again, Brendan led the re-design of the plant, which repositioned equipment, added more dewatering screens and reduced the plant’s footprint. With the new dredge and plant working together, in Simone’s words, they were “supplying sand at a rate we never would have considered 12 months before.”
It was a significant achievement in the face of another major undertaking; the pair received bad news from a poor material test result. Instead of letting it break them, Simone and Brendan used it as a catalyst.
“We designed and built a secondary process into the plant by which we could remove chemical impurities without upsetting the critical parameters and the balance between each sub-process in the continuous process,” Brendan said. “That was the pinnacle of design in our plant.”
The new system scaled the business to new heights by enabling it to supply B80 specification material used in bridges, tunnels and high-rise buildings around Sydney. The pair estimates ODE Materials was selling a minimum of 10,000 tonnes of sand a month into Sydney alone, with the whole operation controlled by two people, one on the dredge and one on the loader.
“We believe there are plenty of other resources out there that are sterilised or abandoned, and a lot of those people may have derelict equipment they think is past its use-by date,” Brendan said. “Those problems can be addressed with what we do.”
“It’s not just that our plant is a continuous process that means each grain of sand is only handled once when the loader operator fills the truck bins or the fact the whole operation can be run by one operator if the truck drivers can load themselves,” Simone said.
“It’s also because our dredge is not a cutter suction but delivers much higher cutting and agitation of material at the pick-up point and significantly greater dredge depth.”
Simone and Brendan are now sharing their expertise with the Australian quarrying sector under the banner of ODE Materials.
“Our starting point was the end-game – to consistently supply top-quality in-spec sand with zero double-handling and much greater capacity. We reverse-engineered everything from that objective, which is why we ended up with a completely different take on our dredge and processing equipment,” Simone said. “It helped that we were coming from nothing and only had blank pages in front of us and were not locked into traditional thinking. And just because our gear was ‘traditional’ it did not stop Brendan from being able to modify it and build it into our design. We want to help other resource-owners realise their capabilities.” •
For more information, call Brendan on 0414 506 430.
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