Ambitious growth targets
In 2010, riding the wave of rising copper prices, RTB Bor had ambitious goals to increase production from their current 8.1 million tons to over 10.6 mt through a series of upgrades and production improvements. RTB Bor, along with many other companies in Serbia, looked to modernization as a way to dramatically increase throughput and efficiency to reach international standards.
With much of their existing equipment and machines at the concentrator plant over 30 years old and technologically outdated, it was challenging to achieve satisfactory production levels, and operating costs were also running high. Their flotation cells in particular were showing their age and were not up to date in terms of their levels of automation, adding a significant bottleneck to the production goals.