A modest expansion by Great Western Recycling at the Saint Paul Port Authority’s Barge Terminal 1 on the Mississippi River is past, present and future in one package.

The nearly $1 million project that involves razing some outdated grain elevators is happening in a rarely seen part of the city that was the first Port Authority property. The project also helps showcase the river as an industrial – as well as an ecological – asset to the Saint Paul area.

 ”We handle steel and reinforcement bars – the materials that build bridges, roads and buildings throughout the region,” said Great Western president Andrew Staebell, explaining the firm’s material handling operations at the public terminal.

The Saint Paul firm, which began with a horse and buggy in 1925, took over the barge docking operation at Barge Terminal 1 in 1997 as a way to broaden its business and to better handle the shipping of scrap metals.

Great Western leases 14 acres at the Port-owned terminal and is now adding the adjacent 4.5 acres next to where Cenex Harvest States ran a grain-handling complex. The facility, much of which was built in the 1940s, was outdated and deteriorating, and Cenex was under orders from the city to paint or raze its 19, 60-foot high metal silos.

The 64-acre Barge Terminal 1 is on the north side of the Mississippi between Pig’s Eye Lake and Mounds Park where, in a big curve, the river turns south from its brief easterly route through Saint Paul. The Port, established by the Minnesota Legislature in 1932, has owned the terminal since 1934, when it assumed the terminal’s operations from the city. Shortly thereafter, the federal Work Project Administration built the terminal’s metal/concrete dock wall that still is used.

Up to seven barges can tie up along Great Western’s share of the dock wall where the firm loads material from a barge onto a truck or from truck to a barge with little or no on-site storage.

The firm’s crews pick up product with “material movers” – cranes on treads that can be equipped with magnets, four-pronged grabbing claws or four-cubic-yard clamshell scoops.

They handle inbound products like pig iron, salt, fertilizer, wood fiber and aggregates. Out-bound products include scrap iron and steel, feed additives and petroleum coke. Coke, the solid leftover from the refinery process, goes to downriver power plants; the scrap metals to steel mills in Arkansas, Tennessee and Alabama.

Staebell said the company’s public terminal operation is just a small slice of the total barge traffic through the Twin Cities. Most of 9.5 million tons of material barged through last year went through private, company-owned facilities, according to the Minnesota Department of Transportation.