Vale Base Metals and BluestOne sign long-term offtake agreement to repurpose refinery waste in Brazil

TORONTO — Vale Base Metals has signed a commercial off-take and non-binding MOU with BluestOne, a leading Brazilian company that transforms waste to products for agriculture, to provide up to 50,000 tonnes per year of refinery slag from its Onça Puma mine in Brazil for the next 10 years.

BluestOne will commence construction within two years of a plant near Onça Puma to process slag products into a solution to enhance carbon-efficient mineral fertilizers with broad use in the agricultural sector.

Under the terms of the agreement, both companies also agree to work together to explore additional circular economy opportunities for treatment and repurposing further waste products from Onça Puma as well as other Vale Base Metals operations globally. This includes potentially bolstering BluestOne’s production of recycled nickel recovered from waste products around the world.

The MOU also envisages cooperation between Vale and BluestOne to explore additional sustainability partnerships including utilizing the fertilizer from slag for biomass production.

“Waste-to-value and circular mining are key levers in our sustainability strategy and technology roadmap,” said Deshnee Naidoo, CEO of Vale Base Metals. “This MOU and scalability of BluestOne’s technology supports our ambition to capture value from what have historically been waste streams while reducing our legacy environmental footprint as part of a wider approach to circular mining.”