MELTING POT I’d buy that for 84¢

Oct 17, 2008 | 11:17 AM |

Copper hasn't dropped below the dollar mark yet, but one plant that manufactures it has. Wolverine Tube Inc. has sold its non-producing Montreal plant for Canadian $1 (84 cents) to Canada's Mango Copper Industries Inc., according to a recent U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

But the price tag might not be as low as it seems, since it comes with a $7-million indemnity of environmental liabilities. A spokeswoman for Wolverine said that "the company is not aware of any specific environmental liabilities but there's definitely some clean-up that needs to be performed." The Montreal plant, which closed its doors in 2006 when the Huntsville, Ala.-based company began to move away from the plumbing tube market, was one of five North American plants closed by the company during restructuring.

A frosty mug of stainless

Most college students learn about beer. But some University of Wisconsin co-eds will be learning more about the brew than most, and discovering that stainless steel is a good ingredient for the mix. To help train the next generation of fermentation experts, MillerCoors LLC has donated a complete set of pilot-scale brewing equipment to the University of Wisconsin-Madison bacteriology department. The gift, worth more than $100,000, marks the beginning of an ongoing relationship between the university's microbiology community and experts at the MillerCoors Milwaukee brewery, and will be used to launch a new course on fermentation science. Troy Rysewyk, MillerCoors pilot plant master brewer, will help teach advanced brewing techniques using the university's new 10-gallon stainless microbrew system.....