Ambitious plans in Lithuania

Lithuania, the southernmost of the three Baltic States that joined the EU in 2004, is relatively poor in natural raw materials. Its mineral resources are limited to sand, chalk, various types of clay, gypsum and a few other minerals. One of them is opoka, a special mineral with a variety of uses. These types of minerals and their degrees of fractioning are the stock in trade of Tavilta UAB, a Lithuanian company that has been in existence for just ten years.Following the collapse of Communism in 1990, new opportunities were opened up for privatisation in Lithuania. In 1995 Julius Gudavicius established an import/export company to trade in fertilizer, peat and building materials, both in Lithuania and with the neighbouring states of Latvia, Belarus and Russia.Gudavicius, the founder and proprietor of Tavilta, is an energetic personality with plenty of ideas who comes up with many creative initiatives. Thus it was that the company progressed rapidly from its trading activities to extraction, manufacturing and processing options for various materials.Tavilta's opoka quarry.In 2000 the company purchased two quarries and embarked on mineral extraction. One of the quarries was a 41-acre sand quarry in the Raseiniai district and the other an opoka quarry in Silute. In the course of time, Tavilta progressed from purely extracting the raw material to processing and refining it, and more recently the company has also acquired shares of other raw material deposits. Not long ago Tavilta undertook modernisation of its plant, optimising its production and storage facilities. Both quarries are very favourably situated geographically, with a well developed infrastructure, and products reach the customers quickly and smoothly.Tavilta manufactures the following products from the raw materials extracted from the sand and opoka quarries:cat litter;dried sand of various screening fractions for use in dry construction mixes;dried opoka powder of various screenings, which is used in the construction industry, in agriculture for liming acid soils and as an absorbent material in the treatment of water and waste water;dried clay, dried chalk, dried dolomite powder.Various processed products based on sand, clay, dolomite and chalk are manufactured from the materials extracted. The special material opoka is the product of most interest to the pet product trade. A type of rock that is not widely known, opoka has many favourable properties that make it suitable for the production of cat…