Northshore Taconite Plant and Tailings Pond, Minnesota

Northshore Mining, part of the Cleveland-Cliffs company,  operates this taconite plant on the north shore of Lake Superior, with a 2.5 mile long tailings impoundment in the hills four miles west. The magnetite ore that is turned into taconite pellets at the plant (which are used by the steel industry), comes via a dedicated railway from an eight mile long open pit mine, 47 miles away, at the eastern end of the Iron Range. There are a half dozen or so other taconite mines operating in the Iron Range, shipping their product through the port of Duluth. Cleveland-Cliffs pioneered the process of creating taconite in the 1950s, which enabled many of the otherwise played out iron mines of the Iron Range to continue. This was the first taconite production plant, opening in 1955.