Desert Dig : U. S. Borax Still Mines ‘White Gold,’ but Much Has Changed Beneath the Surface for the Company

In some ways, it’s still the good old days at U.S. Borax Inc., just like when Ronald Reagan hosted the company’s “Death Valley Days” TV show in the 1960s and hawked Boraxo soap.

It’s been more than a century since U. S. Borax first mined ore from Death Valley and 67 years since it plumbed the depths of the Mojave Desert here in Boron, a tiny town 120 miles northeast of Los Angeles, to extract ore from one of the world’s largest minable deposits of borax mineral. A few of the famous 20-mule-team wagons are preserved at the edge of the open pit mine. The pit itself just keeps getting bigger--it’s over a mile from lip to lip in any direction and 660 feet at its deepest point, big enough to swallow 10 Rose Bowls.

By the time U. S. Borax pulls all the ore out of this mine, half a century from now, 20 Rose Bowls will fit inside the hole. Day after day, the company extracts the white crystalline ore from the ground, smashes it to powder and ships it around the world to producers of everything from fiberglass to fertilizer to laundry detergent.

But beneath the surface, much has changed. U. S. Borax is now headquartered in Valencia, and the company with an Old West heritage is run by Oxford-educated Brit Ian White-Thomson, and it isn’t even American-owned, having been acquired in 1968 by London-based RTZ Corp., the world’s largest mining concern. RTZ sold the Boraxo, Borateem and 20 Mule Team soap business in 1988 to Dial Corp. And while U. S. Borax still commands half of worldwide borax sales, bringing in $500 million in revenue annually, competition from lower-cost producers such as Turkey has whittled away at the company’s former stranglehold on the market.

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What’s more U.S. Borax’s job has gotten tougher the past few years because weak American and European economies dampened consumer spending on products containing borax. A slow pace of housing starts in the United States has been particularly damaging to borax sales because one of its biggest uses is in building insulation materials.

So U. S. Borax has to dig faster, push harder and be more resourceful than ever. The mule teams, of course, were long ago replaced by freight trains and ocean barges. The mine and plant are now computer-controlled, and run by half as many employees as in the early 1980s. Company scientists tinker in high-tech labs next to the mine and in Valencia, seeking refinements and new uses of the “white gold.” Rather than compete on price, U. S. Borax has invested in service and quality improvements. It has nearly eliminated the black specks in the white borax powder to please customers who want the purest product possible.

Over the years, U. S. Borax has been a steady contributor to RTZ, helping to offset the sometimes wild fluctuations in RTZ’s other operations. Formerly named Rio Tinto-Zinc, the British company also has a historied past dating to the 19th Century and the Rio Tinto copper mine in Spain. It now has $5 billion in annual sales, with operations spanning the globe, including mining for gold, silver, iron and zinc. RTZ’s Borax production--the vast majority of which is from the Boron mine--contributed $108 million in profit to RTZ’s $367 million in net income in 1992.

U.S. Borax is considered so reliable that it elicits yawns from financial analysts who follow RTZ. “It’s quite big, but it’s a relatively stable part of RTZ’s business,” said analyst Jack Jones at the London investment banking firm UBS Ltd. “That’s why most people don’t pay attention to it.” Analyst Vahid Fahti at Kemper Securities Inc. in Chicago calls U. S. Borax “boring, but rather rewarding.”

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Which doesn’t bother White-Thomson a whit. He’s learned that borax isn’t a scintillating dinner party subject. Typically after informing someone that the company no longer makes soap, he said, “that’s the end of the conversation.”

Still, White-Thomson knows he can’t sit still. Not long ago, U. S. Borax “had a reputation for being fat,” said Michael McCoy, managing editor at Chemical Marketing Reporter, a weekly trade newspaper. Lately, White-Thomson said, “we’ve been getting rid of the fat.”

Total employment at U. S. Borax has been cut by more than half since 1982, from 2,400 to 1,100, with most of the company’s workers now in Boron. Daily production has grown by 20% in the past decade. The company attributes that in part to better training.

It’s also because U. S. Borax keeps upgrading to bigger, more efficient equipment. Soon, the electric shovels used to scoop up ore--now big enough to dig a swimming pool in about two scoops--will be replaced by larger ones. The 170-ton dump trucks that carry ore from the bottom of the mine will be supplanted by 250-tonners. Huge storage domes were erected at Boron to assure customers of a constant supply.

The company has cut energy costs by building its own cogeneration plants and selling the power it does not use. It has reduced inventory expenses by storing supplies with its vendors, rather than on-site.

In the mine and adjacent processing plant, hardly a speck of borax goes to waste. Mounds of the stuff are dampened to prevent desert winds from stirring up clouds of borax dust. Catch basins and drainage ditches carry runoff water to huge ponds, which are allowed to evaporate so that the borax can be reclaimed. The plant itself functions like a giant washing machine, cleaning and blending the crushed ore; additional processing is done at a dockside plant in Wilmington, and then the borax powder is shipped around the world to the company’s many industrial customers.

The biggest group of U. S. Borax customers, fiberglass makers such as Owens-Corning Fiberglas Corp., use borax to strengthen building insulation materials and fiberglass auto bodies. General Electric Co. adds it to light tubes because of its heat-resistant qualities. Borax is used in porcelain enamel, test tubes and baking dishes. It helps melt metals. Plants need small amounts of the mineral to live and, in larger quantities, it’s a herbicide. In cosmetics and eyedrops, borax and boric acid are antiseptics; in soap powder, borax acts as a bleach.

To expand its customer base, U. S. Borax is hoping to persuade manufacturers to put borax in container glass. It’s encouraging a new, environmentally friendly process of making paper using borax. Another relatively new borax product that’s gaining acceptance kills termites in lumber but is not toxic to humans.

Long term, the company plans to step up marketing to developing countries. Half of its sales are in the United States, and Europe is its main foreign market. Asia has the biggest potential for growth, although analysts warn that those countries could be slow to develop. But if every person in China had a porcelain enamel cup, White-Thomson said, “the borax industry would boom.”

Now that reruns of old television shows are popular, U. S. Borax even hopes to milk more money out of “Death Valley Days” by licensing about 400 episodes to a broadcast or cable network.

“Death Valley Days” began as a radio program featuring sentimental tales of the Old West. In the late 1950s, it moved to television. Reagan hosted and sometimes acted in the show from 1962 to late 1965, invariably opening with a plug for the 20 Mule Team products, such as Boraxo soap and Borateem laundry powder. In one 1964 tear-jerker, “A Tribute to a Dog,” Reagan starred as a good-hearted lawyer with political aspirations who represents a boy whose dog was killed. Reagan left the show, his last acting job, to run for governor.

It says something about the quiet nature of U. S. Borax’s business that the company is still best known for the old television show. But by the time U. S. Borax sold the soap business six years ago, it had become a chain around the company’s neck. The huge mining concern just wasn’t set up to be an effective consumer products marketer, White-Thomson said.

U. S. Borax also stumbled a few years ago with an attempt to expand beyond borax to mining for molybdenum, a metal element used as an anti-corrosive alloy in steel production. After spending $100 million trying to win government approval over the objections of environmentalists for a molybdenum mine in Alaska, the company was forced to abandon its plans.

The mining concern’s roots date to 1872 with the discovery of borax in Nevada; borax was then used mostly in ceramics and gold processing. Mining operations began in Death Valley in the 1880s after, as legend has it, Aaron and Rosie Winters officially discovered borax there when they poured sulfuric acid and alcohol on some ore. As he set a match to it and watched it turn green, revealing the presence of borax, Winters is said to have shouted: “She burns green, Rosie! We’re rich, by God!”

From 1883 to 1889, the Harmony Borax Works--a predecessor to U. S. Borax--used the 20-mule teams to haul 10-ton loads of borax across “165 miles of thirsty, uninhabited, largely roadless desolation,” Harold O. Weight wrote in his book, “20 Mule Team Days in Death Valley.” In Mojave, the borax was loaded on freight trains. Tales abounded of men dying in the heat, according to Weight, and the summer sun was so intense that wagons were idled from June to September.

Harmony Borax Works closed in the late 1880s because of financial troubles, but the 20-mule teams became the corporate symbol for the next owner of the Death Valley property, Pacific Coast Borax Co., which later became U. S. Borax.

In the mid-1920s, the company acquired the Boron site, where borax reserves were found to dwarf all others. Although borax is a ubiquitous mineral, large deposits are rare because it tends to dissipate in ground water. In Boron, the borax had been preserved between salt on the bottom and clay on the top.

At the Boron mine, life went unchanged for many years. Workers lived in company-owned housing, saw movies at a company theater and drank at a company saloon, but these were all swallowed by the expanding mine in 1964. Some of the mine workers still live in Boron, population 2,000, but many also now live in Lancaster, Palmdale, Tehachapi and Barstow.

Dave Leach, a 29-year U. S. Borax veteran, and his family are throwbacks to earlier days at the mine. His father was a company millwright; his son now operates equipment in the pit. His brother and brother-in-law also work here.

When Leach started at U. S. Borax, most workers had relatives at the mine, and you had to watch what you said because the person you were talking to “might be somebody’s mother, or sister, or brother-in-law.” It was a time, he recalled, when “you wanted for nothing.”

These days, most employees are trained on computers. Space shuttles pass overhead as they come in for landings at nearby Edwards Air Force Base. And Leach’s son-in-law was laid off from the mine a while back, part of the company’s belt-tightening.