The Port of Açu’s Multicargo Terminal (T-MULT) welcomed a ship carrying 25,000 tons of scrap metal. The material was imported from Saint Petersburg, Russia, and brought in by the MV Nordic Bothnia, which docked yesterday in the afternoon on the T-MULT quayside. The cargo will be unloaded one week after the terminal received three wind power blades. That was also a first for the terminal, which opened in 2016. The scrap cargo will be stored in the patio and driven by trucks to steel mills in Barra Mansa and Resende, in the southern part of Rio de Janeiro state.
Port of Açu operations director Ideraldo Goulart reported that T-MULT invested in new equipment to handle scrap metal for the first time and is now able to welcome other ships carrying this type of content: “In addition to all the planning needed to ensure the success of this operation, the Port of Açu, following its growth and innovation roadmap, spent 280,000 reais to purchase two German-made grabs to guarantee the safety and productivity of this and other operations in the future to handle scrap metal,” he said.
Ricardo Collares, commercial manager at the Port of Açu, noted that the new cargo reaffirms the port as a logistic alternative for the Southeast region in Brazil: “Scrap opened up a new opportunity for T-MULT and can be strategic, considering the entire logistics in the steel industry. Just as it imports input for these mills, the terminal has capacity to export steel products, acting in the inverse flow. We are in negotiations toward that end,” he added.
T-MULT already handles pet coke, bauxite, steel industry coal, project cargo and general cargo. The terminal is also authorized to handle any type of solid bulk and has potential to handle containers and motor vehicles.
T-MULT has been operating since the second half of 2016 and has handled over 1.15 million tons of cargo and welcomed 73 vessels. In these last two years, the terminal expedited over 33,000 trucks. Its available infrastructure includes two Mobile Harbor Cranes Terex/Gottwald 4406B, each with a radius of 46 meters and hoisting capacity of up to 100 tons. The terminal also has two patio forklifts, two hoppers with nominal capacity of 360 tons per hour each, two highway scales, 10 metal boxes and four grabs for bulk handling.
Multicargo Terminal
T-MULT has 160,000 square meters of customs area and represents a new distribution alternative in the Brazilian Southeast.
The terminal has 14.5 meters in depth and is certified to receive ships with a draught of up to 13.1 meters. It has 500 meters of quayside, 340 of those being operational, and an annual capacity to handle approximately 4 million tons of solid bulk and general cargo. Adding up shipments of pet coke, coal and bauxite, in 2017, the Multicargo Terminal handled 10 times more than it did in 2016.
Last year, T-MULT started to offer Integrated Logistics Solutions for solid bulk (Port/ Storage/ Transportation). This type of operation handled, in its first year, more than 300,000 tons. In addition to door-to-door solutions for imports and exports, the terminal also did multimodal operations using one transhipment terminal located just 300 km away from the port.
With access to the main Brazilian highways and specialized in solid bulk highway transportation, T-MULT currently performs integrated import and export operations in the states of Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, Goiás and Mato Grosso do Sul.
Another advantage of the Port of Açu Complex is the development of an Export Processing Zone (ZPE), an area of free trade created in the end of 2017 and dedicated to facilities of companies that generate 80% of their revenues from exports. Businesses that process ornamental rocks and coffee are among those that can benefit from the ZPE located in the port area.
