The infamous slag dump at Zeehan on Tasmania's west coast is being mined for its rich zinc deposits amid calls to preserve it as a relic of the town's glory days.

The slag dump has been part of Zeehan's landscape for 122 years. It sits near the ruins of the Tasmanian Smelting Company which closed in 1913.

Mr Phil Vickers from the West Coast Pioneers Museum said that old fashioned smelting techniques failed to remove all of the slag's riches. The extraction process wasn't good enough to achieve a real high recovery. So it was drilled by a company called Dragon Resources from my memory in about 1988 and back then they reckoned there was about USD 70 million of base metal still in the slag."

Now metallurgical company Intec Envirometals is exploiting the dump and the company's managing director Mr Brian Banister estimates the slag is about 13% zinc. He said that in that slag dump there is quite a deal of zinc locked up in the slag itself and that zinc is what we're extracting by a mining process to be exported through the Port of Burnie to customers overseas.

Mr Banister said that it is being shipped to China. Australia hasn't got the economics in place and the infrastructure in place to support the work that we're doing. But it has angered retired miner Ray Keating, who says the dump is an historic site.

He said that there's not much left in Zeehan now, Zeehan's virtually been raped of a lot of its history. I don't like history being ruined, I don't like history being taken away, I think a town that's built on history is a solid town, once everything's taken away, it's no more, it's just forgotten.

(Sourced from www.abc.net.au)