Vinyl Signs Whitby provisions some graphics for a training complex at ICL Boulby that’s a long, long way underground…

We may be asking questions later so, pay attention. Polyhalite is a new, organic, fertiliser that’s produced in Britain and sold the world over by ICL Boulby - the first and only polyhalite miner and producer in the world.

If you have the stomach for the trip, you’ll find the polyhalite itself well over 1000 metres below ground and way out under the North Sea when you get there. It’s been down there a while. The deposits are around 260 million years old, and they have a unique composition that makes them probably the world’s most effective naturally occurring fertilising medium.

Among the amazing properties the product can claim is that it works even when used like a condiment among other, nitrogen-based fertilisers. Trials have shown a 40% improvement. That’s very significant with a hungry world to feed in the long term and environmental factors looking a synthesised product ever harder right now.

It probably goes without saying that “one does not simply walk into such a deep, dark, place as Boulby, and start digging.” It’s possibly one of the most scrutinised and regulated environments in terms of its operator health and safety. And it’s no place for anyone with fear of the imagery that being a kilometre plus underground evokes. Cue cold sweats.

Knowing how to operate and behave in what would otherwise be a very dangerous environment, involves training and much of that is delivered right at the sharp end of things in a classroom complex that is itself way down in the mine. It’s here that critical personnel and qualified visitors to the plant get an orientation in safe underground operations, the rules, the procedures, the processes. 

When Rob Lamerton at Vinyl Signs Whitby got the call from ICL Boulby looking for graphics to furnish the walls of its training complex, no thought was given to the possibility that he may have to actually install them. It was only after a detailed discussion, some persuasive negotiations, and a little laboured reservation that agreement was reach that the mine would use its own maintenance personnel to install what Rob and his team would produce. 

The graphics were a simple enough undertaking. Panels with text and pictures in continuation of what the teaching complex would, err, teach. Despite there being no rain, no UV degradation and little chance of hostile human interference down there, Rob went belt and braces and made the graphics using Metamark MD5 covered with its matching laminate and mounted to sturdy panels for installation. No drama to report there. Like all Vinyl Signs Whitby’s work, the teaching graphics are exactly what the customer wanted.

The graphics were collected with many admiring glances, and that’s the last that anyone will see of them until they’re either recycled topside, or in front of the vanishingly small number of people who’ll make the trip down to one of Earth’s deep places to work once trained. It was one of Vinyl Signs Whitby’s most unusual jobs and we think it’s a bit of an oddity too. So odd in fact, we’re intending to use it as a segue into a question.

Do you know of any graphics produced in unusual circumstances or installed in an unusual place using Metamark materials? We’re all ears if you do. Until we hear otherwise, and we think it likely something will pop up, Rob Lamerton and Vinyl Signs Whitby’s graphics hold a desirable if unofficial record for taking Metamark materials to one of the strangest places on or under earth.

Where In The World do you know of Metamark materials doing their job?   

If you want to know more about Boulby and one of the world’s most promising materials, read Material World by Ed Conway - Available on Amazon.