Environmental Stewardship

Canoitas, Mexico

For the seventh consecutive year, the team at our Canoitas site in Mexico continued a program of monitoring native bees, reaching 235 morphospecies — 21 species more than in 2024. Since beginning the program, more than 35 new species for the state have been identified.

In 2025, the team at Fort Smith made changes to the way they monitor quality during production, helping ensure that production meets our customers’ standards. Improved production means less waste of time and resources during operations — and less material wasted because it doesn’t meet specifications. Over the course of the year, the changes reduced the amount of generated waste by thousands of tons. Now, instead of hauling waste away in a diesel-powered front-loader once a week, the team only needs to do it once a month. 

Improved logistics resulted in a second path to reduced energy consumption. The team opened a warehouse closer to the production area in 2025. Approximately half of the plant’s production is now hauled a much shorter distance, again saving on the fuel needed to transport the sand. 

As both initiatives show, energy efficiency improvements can be an additional outcome of operational changes. In other cases, initiatives that may be primarily about energy efficiency can drive other improvements. For example, the plant installed variable frequence drives (VFDs) on fans. That means that the fans can be run at slower speeds — rather than having to run at full speed and use a damper to control the airflow. Reducing energy consumption is the main purpose of the VFDs, but reducing wear and tear on the fans is also a benefit. 

"What we see is that energy efficiency is often an important benefit of the projects that make the most business sense. When you’re doing what’s right for the customers and the company, it usually means using resources as responsibly as you can." -Bill Blackmore, Plant Manager at Ft. Smith

Over the past several years, our site in Dividing Creek, New Jersey, has significantly improved its water recycling performance, and today, the system recycles nearly all water used in operations. Earlier efforts focused on repurposing existing equipment — such as bins and pump— to more efficiently capture overflow water and redirect it back into the system. These improvements led to a substantial increase in recycled volumes, rising from roughly 3 billion gallons in 2022 to 6 billion in 2023, and approximately 7 billion gallons in 2025.

Monthly tracking shows that roughly 96-98% of total water use is recycled, with only a small percentage coming from external “virgin” water sources such as wells. This performance is enabled by a network of 27 pumps that move reclaimed water across the site, sometimes over several miles, to supply active dredging areas. 

Looking ahead, the team plans to further expand the system with additional pumping capacity to recover and redistribute water from older mining areas. This ongoing investment reflects a commitment to maximizing water reuse while supporting long-term operational sustainability.