By CHATULA KANGALI –
HANDYMAN’S Lime, the third company to produce lime in Zambia, has temporarily been shut down to allow the kilns to cool down after experiencing high temperatures.
Project manager Lyle Doogan said in an interview that the lime plant was temporarily shut down two months ago and was currently under modification.
He said the company would resume production in September this year.
“We are currently waiting for the temperatures which were above 2, 000 degrees Celsius to come back to normal for us to resume production.
“This process is normal because the equipment was designed in such a way,” he said.
Mr Doogan said the company had enough stocks and that no employee at the plant was retrenched as a result of the shutdown.
He said the firm had a production capacity of 600 tonnes of lime a day and a workforce of more than 200.
He said the company was slowly penetrating the local market despite business being hard as a result of low copper prices on the international market.
“Business for lime is quite hard, we depend on copper and at the moment the copper prices are low, so we are also not getting as expected,” he said.
Ndola Lime and Neelkanth Lime are the other lime producing companies in Zambia.
