Desert Dig : U.S. Borax Still Mines Ore, but Its Focus Has Changed

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.

As it has for the past 67 years, the company day after day extracts borax from the depths of the Mojave Desert here in this tiny Kern County town 120 miles northeast of Los Angeles. Taken from a pit now more than a mile wide and 660 feet deep, the white crystalline ore is smashed into powder and shipped around the world to producers of everything from fiberglass to fertilizer to laundry detergent.

Preserved at the edge of the open pit mine as symbols of U.S. Borax’s continuity and Old West heritage are a few of the famous 20-mule-team wagons used to haul 10-ton loads of borax when the company mined the desolate Death Valley in the 1880s.

But beneath the surface, much has changed.

For one, the Valencia-based company long ago passed from American ownership. It was acquired in 1968 by London-based RTZ Corp. And, while it still provides about half of the borax sold in the world, competition primarily from low-cost mining operations in Turkey has whittled away at its former stranglehold on the market.

In recent years, its major problem has been economic troubles in the United States and Europe, which have weakened sales of borax products. Particularly damaging has been the slow pace of housing starts in the United States because much of the demand for borax is for building insulation materials.

To cope, U.S. Borax has to dig faster, push harder and be more resourceful than ever. The mine and plant are 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.

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The result is an operation that is a steady contributor to RTZ, helping to offset the sometimes wild fluctuations in RTZ’s other gold, silver, iron and zinc mining operations spanning the globe.

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. Borax sales are about $500 million of RTZ’s $5 billion in annual revenue.

In essence, U.S. Borax, whose roots go back more than 120 years to the first discovery of borax in Nevada, is “boring, but rather rewarding,” says Vahid Fahti, an analyst with Kemper Securities Inc. in Chicago who follows RTZ.

That description doesn’t bother Ian White-Thomson a whit. The British, Oxford-educated head of U.S. Borax has learned that borax isn’t a scintillating dinner party subject. Typically after informing someone that the company no longer makes soap, he says, “that’s the end of the conversation.” RTZ sold the Boraxo, Borateem and 20 Mule Team soap business in 1988 to Dial Corp.

White-Thomson has concentrated on making the mining operation as lean and efficient as possible.

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.

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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.”

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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.

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. The soap business, for which the show was a major advertising vehicle, had become a drain on U.S. Borax when it was sold. 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.