We search new applications for our products constantly and the improvement of processes to reduce our environmental footprint
Inspired by the principles of continuous improvement, CAVISA is constantly developing researching new resources with the aim of offering a sustainable management and benefit of the minerals it recovers and rehabilitation activities.
CAVISA is focused on the development of applications of non-metallic industrial minerals, mainly silicates, easily recoverable natural resources increasingly used in controversial sectors to reduce their environmental footprint.
Laboratory
From the laboratory in addition to controlling the field research and current production in our Vimianzo Work Center, we develop processes to check new projects continuously, which can generate new products to incorporate into the agreement portfolio with changing demands on the market and the various sectors.
The laboratory is an essential part of research operations, providing continuous innovation. This researching spiral attaches CAVISA as a reference in the valorization of non-metallic minerals.
Research priorities in the CAVISA laboratory are:
- Improvements in reservoir research: new resources, efficiency and sustainability.
- Production improvements: new products, efficiency and quality.
- Improvement in Commercial Network: New sectors where our natural raw materials can enter.
- R&D&I improvements: smart solutions for new challenges.
- Improvement in Organization: Focus on customer, export, innovation takes precedence.
- Investment improvements: to grow and contribute to the regional development of Costa da Morte.
- Improvements in Social and Human Resources Policies: transmit the "know how" efficiently. Prevention first and foremost. Fight child labour and discrimination in its forms.
- Marketing improvements: image, trust, quality.
Pilot plant
Our Pilot Plant, already built by Rio Tinto Minera in 1978, complements the Laboratory and allows us to foresee how resources will behave in our plant, while we can treat samples of other sources in it and determine thus its use and degree of employability and the sectors we know. It also covers samples from other mines as well as new research sites.
Mining research
CAVISA arises from the Rio Tinto Research Department, carries mining research in its DNA and therefore surely survives the initial project of the 80s, in which it was estimated only 10 years of life, providing new resources with which could be supply new sectors and applications and therefore continue to work.
Mining Research Department, which integrates the Supervision of Mining Work, focuses on two coordinate axes:
- On the one hand, to maximize the use of deposits already identified, seeking to improve efficiency and recovery,
- And on the other hand, discovering new deposits of non-metallic minerals, particularly kaolins and other silicates on the Costa da Morte.
Inspired by the work of the Rio Tinto mining research team, with geologists Jorge Reyes and D. Manuel Montes, and the heritage of Professor Mr. Isidro Parga Pondal.
Environmental research
Circular thinking offers new challenges and new possibilities that CAVISA faces with cooperation with new partners generating interdisciplinary teams with which to respond to new challenges.
- The search for new applications, sometimes replacing non-renewable raw materials.
- The implementation of the technical improvements available to achieve more efficient installations.
- Landscape integrations, environmental and ecological rehabilitations.
- The recovery of inert waste….
- Vimianzo weather station