Samarco Brand Guidelines: A Vale–BHP Pellet Maker, From Germano to the Port of Ubu

An American pelletising know-how and a Brazilian ore body nobody had mined.

Samarco began as a project in 1971, the company says, joining the American miner Marcona Corporation, which knew how to concentrate and pelletise iron ore, with S/A Mineração Trindade (Samitri), which held the mining rights to the Alegria complex in Minas Gerais. The ore there was itabirite, a low-grade rock that had not been mined in Brazil, and the plan was to turn what had been treated as waste into a saleable product. Samarco Mineração S.A. was created in 1973, and operations began in 1977 — the year Portuguese Wikipedia gives as the founding date.

The company dates its start precisely: the first pumping of ore slurry on 11 May 1977, and a first shipment of pellet feed from the port of Ubu in August that year. Ownership changed on the American side. Samarco says Marcona came under Utah International in 1977, that both were later bought by General Electric, and that in 1984 the Australian miner BHP acquired them and with them 49 per cent of Samarco.

On the Brazilian side, Vale bought Samitri in 2000; Folha de S.Paulo reported the purchase on 31 May 2000, according to Portuguese Wikipedia. After an agreement with BHP, each came to hold half of Samarco — from 2000, the company says, or 2001, according to Portuguese Wikipedia. It remains a privately held joint venture of Vale and BHP Brasil, with its head office in Belo Horizonte.

Germano, a long pipeline and the pellet plants at Ubu.

Samarco works from mine to port. Its ore is extracted and concentrated at the Germano complex, on the boundary of Mariana and Ouro Preto in Minas Gerais, home to the Alegria mines and three concentrators. The company says the ore arrives at about 40 per cent iron and leaves at around 67 per cent. As a slurry it then travels by pipeline — close to 400 kilometres long, the company says — to the Ubu complex at Anchieta, in Espírito Santo, where it is pelletised and loaded at Samarco’s own port terminal. Portuguese Wikipedia adds an office in Vitória for foreign trade.

The pipeline is central to how the company describes itself. Samarco says it was the first company in Brazil to move ore that way, in the late 1970s, and that for more than three decades its line was regarded as the longest iron ore pipeline in the world; those are its own claims. Its main product is the iron ore pellet, sold to steelmakers and direct-reduction plants.

The business grew in stages, the company says: a new pellet plant at Ubu in 1997, a third pelletising project completed in 2008 with a further pipeline, and a final expansion in 2014 that added a fourth pellet plant, a third concentrator and a third pipeline. It also owns the Muniz Freire hydroelectric plant in Espírito Santo and holds a share in the Guilman-Amorim plant in Minas Gerais.

On 5 November 2015 the Fundão tailings dam at Germano failed, with effects along the Rio Doce basin in Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo, as the company’s own history puts it. The state government of Minas Gerais suspended Samarco’s activities on 9 November 2015, Portuguese Wikipedia says, and operations stopped for five years. An agreement between Samarco, Vale, BHP and the federal and state governments created the Fundação Renova to run repair and compensation programmes.

Design and documentation.

Iron ore miners sell a raw material that few people ever see, so their public image is built from the places where it comes out of the ground. The standard picture is aerial: a red-earth open pit cut into benches, haul roads spiralling down its walls, trucks reduced to specks. Underground miners show the opposite view — tunnels, drill rigs and lit caverns far below the surface — but the aim is the same, to make scale legible.

The second set of images is about movement. Iron ore is heavy and cheap to dig but costly to carry, so miners photograph the chain that gets it to customers: ore trains kilometres long crossing dry country or snow, pellet plants and stockpiles, and export jetties where bulk carriers load at the end of a long line. Rail and port pages often get as much space as the mines themselves.

Much of what these companies publish is explanation. Websites and reports carry geology and grade explainers, describe ore types such as lump, fines and pellets, and set out reserves and production as the companies report them. Alongside sit pages on rehabilitation of mined land, water use and tailings, and on newer projects to cut emissions in steelmaking.

The last layer is accountability. Miners publish community and Indigenous-partnership reports, accounts of resettlement where mines reach towns, sustainability reports and, for listed or state-owned groups, detailed annual reports. For a designer, the identity of an iron ore company lives as much in these documents, maps and diagrams as in any logo.

A restart without a tailings dam, and a settlement in court.

Samarco received a corrective operating licence in October 2019, the company says, but waited for a tailings filtration system, finished in October 2020, before restarting. Production resumed in December 2020 at 26 per cent of installed capacity, without a tailings dam; the third pellet plant at Ubu restarted in August 2024 and a second concentrator in December 2024, taking it to 60 per cent. The company says it aims to return to full installed capacity from 2028.

Its finances went through the courts. Samarco filed for judicial recovery in Minas Gerais in 2021 — in April, by its own account — to renegotiate debt held mostly by foreign bondholders, and on 12 August 2025 the state court ended the process, the Belo Horizonte newspaper Estado de Minas reported.

The wider legal settlement came in October 2024, when a compensation and reparation agreement between the Brazilian authorities and BHP, Vale and Samarco was signed and ratified, Reuters reported. By August 2026, Reuters said, 45 of the 49 eligible municipalities had joined it, including Mariana. Separately, in November 2025 London’s High Court ruled that BHP was responsible under Brazilian law for the dam failure; a further trial on damages was expected to begin in April 2027. A settlement offer in that English case, reported in August 2025, had not been agreed at that time.

Today Samarco’s website leads with repair, geotechnical structures and the restart, and speaks of doing “a different kind of mining” — its own phrase, in Portuguese, for operating without tailings dams.

For a design guide, Samarco shows how a company’s public identity can be reorganised around reparation and engineering detail rather than product. Compare its owners Vale and BHP. For this guide we use an Atlantic slate, an ochre and a pale mist with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Samarco’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.