Kennecott Bingham Copper Mine

One of the attractions southwest of Salt Lake City is the Bingham Canyon Mine, also known as the Kennecott Copper Mine, an open-pit mining operation in the Oquirrh Mountains. It is the deepest open-pit mine in the world, and has been in production since 1906, resulting in the creation of a pit over 0.75 miles deep, 2.5 miles wide, and covering 1900 acres. Employing 1,800 employees and hundreds of contractors, 450,000 tons of material are removed from the mine daily. Electric shovels can carry up to 56 cubic yards or 98 tons of ore in a single scoop. Ore is loaded into a fleet of 64 large dump trucks which each carry 255 tons of ore at a time; the trucks themselves cost about $3 million US each. There is a five mile series of conveyors that take ore to the Copperton concentrator and flotation plant. The longest conveyor is 3 miles long. As of 2010, Kennecott Utah Copper is the second largest copper producer in the United States and provides about 13-18% percent of the U.S.'s copper needs. Kennecott’s Bingham Canyon Mine is the largest man-made excavation in the world, and is visible with the naked eye from space. It is one of the top producing copper mines in the world with production at more than 18.7 million tons. Every year, Kennecott produces approximately 300,000 tons of copper, along with 400,000 ounces of gold, 4 million ounces of silver, about 20 million pounds of molybdenum, and about 1 million tons of sulfuric acid, a by-product of the smelting process. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1966 under the name Bingham Canyon Open Pit Copper Mine. Although not much here to appeal to one's sense of aesthetics, the sheer magnitude of the operation is impressive, and the high cost of copper on today's market makes it a tad more interesting as well.