Mine-friendly toilet gains global recognition.

• Author: Ross, Ian
• Position: SPECIAL REPORT: MINING

The makers of a successful portable mining toilet expect to roll out a slew of new fibreglass products and create more jobs once they move into an expanded shop this fall.

Sudbury's Rezplast Manufacturing Ltd. has made great strides since introducing their environmentally-friendly mining toilet to the world at the MINExpo show in Las Vegas two years ago.

Since then, general manager Sandro Spadafora estimates they've sold more than 200 toilets to the likes of Inco, Falconbridge (now Xstrata Nickel), West Virginia coal miners Consol Energy and Codelco, Chile's state-run national copper corporation, as well as the U.S. government.

A chance encounter by Spadafora last year in a Detroit airport with a superintendent from Halliburton, the massive petroleum and energy industry supplier to the U.S. government, resulted in an order of 20 portable toilets sent to a nuclear waste dump in New Mexico.

Rezplast's inventiveness in designing and manufacturing mining toilets and emergency safety shower systems earned them a provincial Global Traders Award last spring for innovation and export growth.

The "small little custom company" took an expensive gamble by attending the Vegas mining show. But the event exposed their product to a wider international audience and fattened up their order book.

In mid-September, the company's 15 employees began packing up to move from their 3,500-square-foot building on Kelly Lake Road into a 20,000-square-foot facility on Notre Dame Avenue.

Leading up to the Vegas launch, about 95 per cent of their business catered to Sudbury's two biggest miners.

Two years later, the local market constitutes only 20 per cent due to growing sales in the mining and forestry sectors in northeastern Ontario, western Quebec, and especially the U.S. market and internationally.

"We've diversified more to have a larger client base and we're producing more product than we ever have."

Known in Sudbury for specializing in the design, manufacture and supply of safety and mining products, as well as plastic and fibreglass reinforced plastic products, the company also makes a line of Kevlar and fibreglass 'Kanuk' canoes, a product Spadafora calls a locally-produced "hidden gem."

The new space gives them a more visible store front and showroom, while also protecting their employees from any harmful emissions in their manufacturing process.

The portable toilet emerged out of a collaboration between Rezplast and the engineering team at Sling-Choker. Inco...