Boral Brick: Too BIG?

Tuesday afternoon of this week, the TribStar broke a story about a temporary shut-down at Boral Brick on the south side of Vigo County (huge new facility across from the school on US41).

As you may recall, less than a year ago, Boral opened its largest brick facility ever – and reportedly the biggest of any manufacturer in the nation – and now is ‘temporarily’ shutting down for an indefinite period of time to reduce inventory. The most alarming piece of this story is that they never got to a point where they ran a second shift and ran at half-speed, according to one man at the company:

“We never got to go to two shifts,” Camp said. “We have run half-speed because of what we have seen in the economy. I could not put the other personnel on. We filled the yard running half-speed and never stretched our legs to run at 120 million bricks a year,” Camp said.

Despite the weak economy, these facts beg the question if the facility was built too big in the first place. If you can build a smaller facility and run two or three shifts with the same equipment, especially when kilns have to be fired 24/7 to maintain the temperatures needed, it’s a much more efficient use of capital. Reportedly, the kilns are ran on methane from a nearby Republic landfill; however, nothing could be found if this is indeed *free* or if the company does pay some fee to Republic for the gas (the more likely scenario).

Read the full story here: http://www.tribstar.com/news/local_story_041153131.html