upfront Courtesy of Corner Cast
S U R FA C E M I N I N G
Corner Cast’s temporary truck shop at Bloom Lake required 40-by-40-foot doors and an interior of 160 by 100 feet.
A recyclable building A second important advantage is that the modular structure can be disassembled and moved elsewhere on site as needed. Cliffs is currently using the shop for light maintenance on heavy equipment and the building can also be used to assemble new trucks or other tasks that demand a large protected workspace. If no longer needed at its current location, it could be moved to a different spot to continue duty as a maintenance facility. “From what I see, almost everything would be reusable, if we moved it to another area,” says Amélie Dorion, project manager of the operation. “The fact that mining companies can actually reuse these things later down the line at another location on their facility is really the sales point there,” Consiglio agrees. “It is a very unique kind of a proposition for them to have almost a recyclable building that they can just keep moving from place to place.” Dorion points out the Britespan fabric covering is divided into sections; if wind damages one section, it can be replaced without touching the rest. The sturdiest components, shipping containers made of weathering steel, have already been repurposed and can be passed on to further sites or clients. For this reason, Corner Cast was awarded a sustainable development prize by Hydro Québec in June 2014. “With conventional construction you have a huge amount of waste left at the end,” says Consiglio. “You have to do a
demolition of the building, and obviously this is not a very sustainable way to do construction.”
Recession breeds innovation Three years ago, Corner Cast needed to carve its own niche in a difficult, recession-hit market. The company had been building shipping container rooms, thus supplying mining camps with offices and sleeping quarters. But as exploration budgets began to dry up, competition among building suppliers became fierce. Together with a partner in Alberta, Vertical Building Solutions, Corner Cast founders came up with the idea of using furnished shipping containers as the foundation for a fabric roof. “We really had to innovate to succeed in the marketplace,” comments Consiglio. The Cliffs Bloom lake truck shop is Corner Cast’s third hybrid structure. Although it has sold container units in every province in Canada, the company’s biggest projects to date have stayed in Quebec, where it is a licensed contractor. A team of five to nine people did the majority of the installation work. But the obvious attraction of shipping containers is that they travel anywhere. “We could be doing these truck assembly shops for the mining industry in South America very easily,” says Consiglio. “That’s why we strongly believe that this will become not just a product for Canada or Quebec, but something that can be exported all over the world.” CIM August/Août 2014 | 33