„The amber from our deposit comes in a wide range of colors. Its age is estimated at about 40 million years” – emphasized Jacek Gendek, President of the Board of Stellarium, a company that in May launched industrial mining of amber in the mine in Niedźwiadów in the Podlaskie Voivodeship on the basis of a concession obtained in July 2018. „Since the start of sales in July, interest in the extracted raw material has exceeded our expectations. Our customers are primarily jewelry and utility item manufacturers using larger chunks of amber. Meanwhile, cosmetic companies and alcohol producers are the recipients of fine amber” – he said.
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Preparations for the start-up of the mine on the plots in Niedźwiadko near Lublin began in 2014 and included, among other things, the construction of over 80 drilling holes, from which samples were taken to confirm the existence of the deposit, as well as the preparation of all the formalities necessary to obtain a concession for the extraction of amber. Amber is extracted using the open-pit method – which involves uncovering successive layers to gain access to the layers containing the Baltic gold located at a depth of less than 15 m in the glauconite deposit. „Our mine is a pioneering undertaking – we could not draw on the patterns or use the experience of existing mines of this type, because there simply were none. The development of the technology for extraction, separation, and purification and segregation of the raw material is an original concept developed by a team of engineers, miners, and geologists working for the company.” Most of the technological solutions used in the process were known before, but in such a configuration and in such innovative combinations they were used for the first time in our mine,” stated the Gendek president. The innovative solutions were applied in areas such as, among others, protecting the site from the inflow of groundwater, the continuous drainage of water from the site of the quarry, the separation of amber from glauconite clay, the circulation of industrial water, the purification of highly originally contaminated amber, size, weight, and quality separation of raw amber.
The amber mine in Niedźwiadko is also completely environmentally safe, as the implemented solutions guarantee that the groundwater levels remain at the current level. Moreover, after the completion of the extraction, the Stellarium Company is obliged to rehabilitate the entire area, and recreational areas are planned for the local community on the mining sites. The exploitation of the deposits from areas that are to be successively expanded is planned for several decades.
