Towards Zero Harm

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TOWARDS ZERO HARM – A COMPENDIUM OF PAPERS PREPARED FOR THE GLOBAL TAILINGS REVIEW

TOWARDS ZERO HARM – A COMPENDIUM OF PAPERS PREPARED FOR THE GLOBAL TAILINGS REVIEW

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LESSONS FOR MINING FROM INTERNATIONAL DISASTER RESEARCH D. Kemp • Mining companies could improve their ‘contextual intelligence’ by paying greater attention to the social, environmental and local economic context in which a project is situated, and the project’s effects on that context. • Including vulnerability as a relevant factor in root cause analysis would support mining companies to account for the structural and systemic aspects of disaster risk. • Mining companies could consider utilising other relevant frameworks, such as the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030. • Better enabling of social specialists to contribute to tailings risk management (e.g. through participation in interdisciplinary processes) could help mining companies to avoid harm. • Both public and private sector actors should consider broadening the ‘circle of knowledge’ on disaster prevention, to include the natural, physical and social sciences, and the lived experiences of affected people. • Tailings facilities are complex entities that operate as a system within the broader context of mining operations, their external societal and environmental settings, and their potential to last in perpetuity. • Tailings facilities are complex systems that need to be managed with a systemic approach for effective risk management. • Although there are always immediate technical reasons for tailings facilities failures, the overarching technical and governance factors that allowed the facilities to approach a critical state are, in most cases, the root cause of the failure. • The systematic management approach for tailings facilities involves vertical and horizontal integration of all functions (planning, design, construction, operation, management, oversight) that operate and collaborate within a broader framework. • The resulting management framework must be supported by effective communication, transparent and robust data management, and information flows that builds knowledge and experience. Success also requires leadership, appropriate incentives and a culture of performance. • Ultimately, the framework and resulting systems management has to be based on leadership that drives a culture of system-level performance MINE TAILINGS – A SYSTEMS APPROACH A. Kupper, D. van Zyl, J. Thompson

THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION IN IMPROVING TAILINGS MANAGEMENT D. Williams • If tailings facilities were built to a similar margin of safety to water dams, this would prevent many tailings facility failures. • There is a commonly held perception in the mining industry that transporting tailings as a slurry to a facility is the most economic approach, but this fails to factor in the true cost of closing and rehabilitating the resulting tailings facility. • A rethink is required about the way in which tailings management is costed. A substantial portion of global tailings practice still uses the Net Present Value (NPV) approach with a high discount factor. What is needed is a whole-of-life cost approach. • In practice, not enough tailings facilities have been successfully rehabilitated, due to the difficulty of capping a ‘slurry-like’ (wet and soft) tailings deposit and the excessive cost involved, particularly at a time when the mine is no longer producing revenue. • The implementation of existing and new technologies to tailings management could help to eliminate the risks posed by the nature of conventional tailings facilities that have been responsible for the failures that have occurred, possibly removing them altogether. • A fundamental barrier to the implementation of innovative tailings management at those sites that would benefit from these technologies is people’s resistance to change, which is often disguised as unsubstantiated claims about perceived high costs, technical obstacles and uncertainty. • Change is more likely to be achieved in new mining projects than existing operations. Hence, change in tailings management for the industry as a whole will necessarily be generational. LESSONS FROM TAILINGS FACILITY DATA DISCLOSURES D. Franks, M. Stringer, E. Baker, R. Valenta, L. Torres-Cruz, K. Thygesen, A. Matthews, J. Howchin, S. Barrie • The Investor Mining and Tailings Safety Initiative, as described in Chapter XVII, conducted the most comprehensive global survey of tailings facilities ever undertaken. The trends identified from this dataset highlight the value of information disclosure by companies. • Analysis of company-disclosed data collected through the Initiative indicate that upstream facilities still make up the largest proportion of total reported facilities (37 per cent), although construction rates for upstream facilities have declined in recent years. • The rate of reported past stability issues for facilities in the data base exceeded one per cent for most construction methods, highlighting the universal importance of careful facility management and governance. • Over 10% of facilities in the database reported a stability issue, and the percentages for upstream, hybrid and centreline facilities were even higher. Statistical analysis provides a high level of confidence that the higher rate of reported stability issues for upstream facilities is not attributable to