Marble touted as economic opportunity for N.S.

Burnside - Celtic Marble on Akerley recently hosted an education session aimed at raising awareness of Nova Scotias own high quality marble resources and the business opportunities connected to them.

The session began with a presentation by Garth Demont, a mineral inventory geologist with the provincial Department of Natural Resources. Demont described the billion years of geological activity it took to produce the various types of marble found in Nova Scotia today, including rare red marble.

The valuable red colouring of the rock was created through the release of iron oxide, which became bound up in the marble through several melting and reforming cycles as it slowly worked it way north from the area now known as the South Pole.

Demont says the age and quality of Nova Scotias marble deposits are equal to that of anywhere else in the world, but it faces certain challenges in getting to market.

Such quarrying operations face large start-up and marketing costs, Demont says, plus one of the biggest obstacles is consumer perception. If the marble has an Italian stamp on it, you have almost instant market acceptance.

Chris Trider, president of MacLeod Resources Ltd., has already taken that into consideration. MacLeod is currently extracting red marble from a quarry near River Dennis in Inverness County. He has established connections in Italy and his stone has been marketed from there for three years. The company also does much of its production work in Carrera, Italy. However, Trider is quick to point out this is only one part of his overall marketing strategy.

Weve worked very hard and invested significantly in developing our brand as Canadas Marble with an eye to developing international markets, Trider says.

Those efforts are beginning to pay off. MacLeod Resources recently signed a new strategic partnership deal with investors in Shanghai that has already produced shipments of stone to China. Trider says the market for luxury building materials like his is strong in China and he expects the relationship to be a long one. He also expects it to be the foundation of other similar ventures.

Now that were developing this strategic partnership in China, were definitely going to be taking our model and looking at other opportunities for additional quarries across the province, Trider says.

Helping to get other quarries started is something Demont is also keenly interested in. He is working with colleagues in the Department of Economic Development, the Strait Highlands Development Agency, Cape Breton Partnerships and Enterprise Cape Breton Corp. to organize a conference this fall that will bring together all of the provinces stone quarry operators to discuss opportunities for expanding their industry.

Operations like MacLeod Resources are creating good paying jobs in rural areas while maintaining a small environmental footprint, Demont says. Theres also a lot of export and secondary processing opportunities if we can develop more of these types of quarries across the province.

One of the strategies the conference will look at for assisting quarry operators overcome the costs and challenges associated with starting new sites is the creation of a central processing facility, possibly in the Melford area.

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