SHARPSVILLE, PA. New business fires up at SQP
Test drilling for a proposed industrial park turned up a huge deposit of slag produced by for blast furnaces.
By HAROLD GWIN
VINDICATOR SHARON BUREAU
SHARPSVILLE, Pa. -- The foundry at SQP Industries on Sixth Street may be silent but a new business has sprung up on the plant's back lot.
Don Lacey, who was chief operating officer of SQP when it was forced to shut down in October 2001, is back at the helm of the new operation, also called SQP Industries.
The new version isn't manufacturing a product, however. It's digging up the byproduct of foundry operations at the site from decades ago.
The buildings and the 50-acre site are owned by Hempfield Partners Inc. of Pittsburgh (the Snyder Group) which bought the plant out of federal bankruptcy court in February 2001 for $1,055,000.
Here are the plans
Lacey said the owners planned to develop the buildings and surrounding land as an industrial park and ordered some test drillings be done on what appeared to be unused land at the western end of the site.
What they found was about 35 acres of blast furnace slag -- "At least 2 million tons," Lacey said -- and a new business plan.
SQP Industries is digging up that slag, screening it and selling it to the paving industry as an aggregate base material for roads, parking lots and driveways.
"It's unbelievable," Lacey said, noting no one knew the material was there. It was covered with soil, trees and weeds, he said, noting the last blast furnace operations on the property were in the mid-1960s.
The material they found is about 50 feet deep, he said. At a rate of 200,000 to 250,000 tons a year, it will take eight to 10 years to dig it up, he said, adding that there may be more on the property that hasn't been found yet.
SQP sells the slag for $6.75 per ton.
Testing by PennDOT
Independent tests show the slag is safe and the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation is testing it as well to be sure it meets state requirements for paving aggregate, Lacey said.
The state is expected to certify the material for highway use and SQP Industries is also looking at getting the same certification from the Ohio Department of Transportation, he said.
The company, which began operations in March, has six production employees so far (including a couple of former foundry workers) and will add more as the demand grows, he said.
The plant had been known as Sharpsville Quality Products before that, an employee-led enterprise that brought the foundry back from an earlier bankruptcy by Shenango Inc. eight years ago.
The employee-controlled operation was forced into bankruptcy and a deal was made to sell it to Hempfield Partners which restarted the foundry and was doing well producing ingot molds for the steel industry and counterweights for the heavy-lifting industry until the steel industry nose-dived last year.
Lacey said the Snyder Group still intends to pursue the industrial park idea but that the slag recovery business has moved to the front burner for now.