Excavator Story

Author: Katherine Bates and Thomas Payne 

With everything that Oil-Dri does and has accomplished, we often forget that Oil-Dri is a Clay Mining Company. To mine for the clay that goes into so many of our products, we need large heavy equipment. Do you remember your Tonka truck as a kid? We own a bunch of them!

The Oil-Dri Georgia location owns and operates 30 pieces of heaving mining equipment that come in the form of excavators, bulldozers, super dumps, and articulated trucks. 

In fact, the Georgia plant recently purchased a new excavator that cost $1,300,00.00. Wow, that is a lot of zeros! With the help of this new excavator and with the work of our other equipment, we estimate that we will move 4.7 million tons of material or more a year. That is more than the amount of concrete used to build the Hoover Dam! This new excavator has a bucket that holds 8 cubic yards worth of material versus our older excavators, which only hold 5, and when loading a truck (that holds 32 cubic yards) we can fill a truck with only 4 scoops.

In 2023, we totaled 100k man-hours and 480k gallons of fuel. With the new, larger excavator, we will efficiently increase mine productivity.