The world is filled with conveyor belts. Pulled along a system conveyor rollers, these incredible components of technology usually go unnoticed and are underappreciated, but the entire world would be a very different place without them. They are used for anything from transporting heavy boxes around shipping warehouses to a vital element in food production operations.

Deep inside the Western Sahara, in the middle of nothing else but barren desert, stands the earth’s greatest conveyor belt system. It’s so huge actually, that it can be viewed from space. This huge structure expands over 61 kilometres and it is used to transport phosphate stone over the desert.

The automated conveyor belt system begins its trip at the Bou Craa Phosphate Mine. Phosphate is required as a vital farming fertiliser and this Moroccan-controlled territory has over 85% of the world’s current reserves. Phosphate is in high demand around the globe and we use up about 40 million tonnes per year, therefore it is clear why this type of huge structure needed to be created. The belt type is ST 2500 and it is only 80cm broad but has a peak transporting capacity of 2000 tonnes of crude phosphate rock an hour. The numerous conveyor rollers that comprise this system are very important to the smooth functioning.

The Bou Craa phosphate mine was found in The late 1940s by the Spanish. The phosphate deposit situated in the area were actually uncommonly close to the surface and were definitely of specially high purity, therefore it made it an ideal place to mine, although mining didn’t completely begin until the 1960’s. Since the beginning of operations, the mine has continued to expand and today covers a staggering 1,225 hectares. The production in 2001 was 1.5 million metric tonnes of processed phosphate, an abnormally sizeable proportion of the world’s supply from one mine.

The belt, which is operating for longer than three decades, ends its 61 kilometre voyage at the El Aain shoreline where the load is refined and distributed. The belt is not encased and over time, moving phosphate rock has been transported by the prevailing winds and kilometres of land south from the belt now appears completely white from outer-space.

The Bou Craa conveyor belt has such a crucial role to play that in case it ever failed, food prices all over the world would substantially increase as stocks of phosphate fertiliser would become scarcer. Who’d have thought a simple conveyor belt can be so tied in to the worlds food? With only a tiny bit of overstatement, you might state that the conveyor rollers and belt contained in this particular system are what enables billions of people around the globe to eat.

The Bou Craa conveyor is really a accomplishment of technology and exceptional. It’s improbable that we’ll see one more conveyor belt of similar proportions made in our lifetimes.

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