There are few aggregate operations in South Africa that combine production scale, technical sophistication and operational discipline as successfully as AfriSam’s Peninsula Quarry. Situated approximately 25 km north of Cape Town in the Tygerberg Hills, the quarry has earned a reputation as one of the busiest and best-run aggregate operations in the country, supplying large volumes of material into the Western Cape’s asphalt, ready-mix, building and civil construction sectors. Wilhelm du Plessis visited the site and experienced this premium quarry in operation. CRUSHING TARGETS, NOT SAFETY STANDARDS
Safety, operational discipline and continuous optimisation remain central to the way AfriSam manages every aspect of Peninsula Quarry’s operations.
D espite the scale of the operation and the relentless demand placed on the site, Peninsula Quarry’s defining characteristic is not simply its output. According to Works Manager Chris Kruger, the operation is built around a no-compromise philosophy when it comes to safety, environmental management and process optimisation. “At Peninsula Quarry, production is important, but it can never come at the expense of safety or oper- ational discipline,” says Kruger. “Everything we do is measured against those standards.” These principles are deeply integrated into the quarry’s daily opera- tions and influence everything from mine planning and traffic management through to crusher perfor- mance and water usage. For visitors to the quarry, the first impression is one of scale and organisa- tion. The large open pit descends in wide, carefully
engineered benches, while below, an extensive net- work of crushers, screens, conveyors and stockpiles operates in synchronised fashion to maintain produc- tion flow. However, behind the visible infrastructure lies an operation driven by meticulous planning, disci- plined execution and continuous optimisation. A quarry with a long history Peninsula Quarry has been operating since 1963, fol- lowing prospecting work carried out during the early 1960s on the farms Roozenboom, Welbeloond and Mont Blanc. Geological investigations identified significant deposits of hornfelsic quartzite and greywacke asso- ciated with the Malmesbury geological system. The quarry extracts what are referred to on site as “blue rock” and “brown rock”, both of which are well suited for aggregate applications due to their hardness and durability.
MODERN QUARRYING Quarter 2 | 2026 14
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker