In 2019, South African mining giant Palabora Mining Company (PMC) faces the challenge of vermiculite value-added development – the high-purity vermiculite from its mines is sold at low prices mainly as fireproofing filler, despite its unique layered structure. Meanwhile, China’s HBIS Resources, pushing forward with the development of high-strength cementitious materials (ECC), encountered an industry bottleneck that made it difficult to balance lightness and toughness: traditional lightweight aggregates (such as perlite) reduce the strength of the material, and increasing the strength leads to increased brittleness.

Beca’s team came up with a solution: the development of oriented expanded vermiculite (EV) as an artificial defect inducer for ECC, taking advantage of PMC vermiculite’s ‘tunable interlayer spacing’ property. This collaboration has been described by the South African Mining Journal as ‘The Awakening of Laminated Clay’.