Pandemic Responses Bring Lessons for Mining
One thing that can easily be said of human nature is that we are all unique and we each respond to stress and change in different ways.
When I take a self-view, I see an eternal (practical) optimist who is admittedly a bit lacking in the empathetic range, so it typically takes quite a lot to shake me (until it gets very personal or close to me). Even so, from experience, I’ve learned two very big lessons:
When major unwelcome upsets are forced upon me, particularly where they confront my sense of purpose (here comes the personal impact), I have experienced a strong fight and flight response, and even tended towards extreme stress or depression when I’ve found no means of control on the situation. If this has happened to you, please know that this is NORMAL - everyone responds a bit differently, but change is known to bring these types of responses out from all of us.
The best way I’ve found to deal with such change is to first, just accept it - this can be really difficult, but no matter what, take the time to let it sink in and contemplate the situation. Second, go to the core of who you are - remember your strengths, and relevant elements of your comfort zone that make you strong (even if you can’t stay completely in that zone). For me, that is to look for the positive (my default optimism really helps here), and to always look forward. In this way, I’ll see what I can do to adjust, to adapt, and even significantly change my ways of working, so I can function in the new norm (or become comfortable with the constant shifts). Lastly, look to see how others are doing and how you can help them deal with it - because this too will help you.
So, with all that said - in these crazy times where we are all experiencing major risks to our safety, and upsets to our norms in work and life, I chosen path number #2 - to take control of my situation because it is so much less stressful and less harmful to my mental stability!
I’ve allowed myself to take things in, adjusting nearly on a daily basis as my family activities fluctuate or demand my attention. I’ve allowed the upsets (admittedly sometimes with a little frustration), and then let the flow return afterward. And I’ve also turned to my natural instincts in looking for opportunity.
Because at the core of it all, we really are in the midst of some unique, significant learning and growth opportunities! So here are a few things I have taken away thus far.
Observation #1
The advancement of the COVID pandemic has thrown all of us into a world of rapid change and of uncertainty too. We’ve been forced to physically distance ourselves while continuing to work, and so connecting and doing work in new ways. We’ve been asked to stay home when we all need to eat and maintain some sort of social connection. So we are striving to meet our psychological needs while remaining safe too.
Incredibly, the world has responded, and quickly, in so many positive ways. People are offering to help others who cannot easily function under such restrictions, and for those who are at greatest risk. People are offering supplies from their own homes and businesses, offering to deliver these supplies to where they are needed. Almost randomly, people are popping up everywhere to make masks, headbands, face shields and other items currently in need. And people are utilizing new ways to connect, to stay engaged and motivated, and to maintain health - both physically and mentally.
Free services now abound, funding is suddenly available, and extensions on payments have been issued - to help anyone in need, impacted by the distancing (and business closure) measures. And we have raised the levels of gratitude we should all have (all the time) for our front line workers - those putting themselves on the line to support us all in this time of need.
We are a social being, with safety (of ourselves and others) at our core.
It may seem like there’s been a shift, but I like to think of it as a renewed awareness of human psychological needs. We’re witnessing a more caring and respectful community, looking out for others whom we may never have met, and putting value on humans first! And I hope this “shift” is something that does not go away.
Observation #2
Business has also adapted, putting new processes in place - without training, and without standards or procedures guiding the way. Some, shifting how they offer their services, some flipping their entire lines of manufacturing, just to help meet the supply for new demands. The ways that we work have been drastically altered. Whether we have added many precautionary steps to how we work safely together in person, or whether we have shifted to online, remote processes, things are different - and they may never be the same again.
How has it been done? How have we all made these changes in such short order? How is it that we are just going along with these necessary shifts, creating new norms, and making things work?
Everyone working together to figure out new ways, finding good ways to do things (not perfect), respecting knowledge and experience from all, irrespective of position or title.
Everyone accepting the unknowns and experimenting, adapting, and working to become effective and efficient within this new realm.
Everyone sharing words of encouragement, supporting each other along the way.
Everyone sharing lessons, both positive and negative, accepting that we might not get it perfectly right the first time around.
We are resilient.
Everyone is trying new things, learning to learn, and being okay with the imperfection of it all! In other words, we are using our natural human instincts and agile capabilities, to stay safe, and to re-establish a renewed sense of control and comfort.
Observation #3
These may tie together, but the world - both in business and in society - has come together. Data collection, sharing of information - stats, testing processes, and protection measures, development of solutions, and more. We are all pulling in the same direction, working to understand the virus and how it moves, working to stop its spread, and supporting efforts to manage and survive through this pandemic, as well as strive towards the recovery efforts that will happen afterward.
We have the ability to solve grand complex challenges when we:
Know when help is needed and we ask for it.
Become transparent and share knowledge and information, and lots of it.
Trust in the trials, successes, and failures of others.
Compile said information and lessons together, and look at patterns and such as a whole.
Learn from and build upon each others’ strengths and insights.
We are a STRONGER force when we collaborate!
We all have strengths we can bring to the table, if only we can align, learn to listen to each other, and collaborate. It seems this is a norm for all emergency situations, so why can we not rely on these capabilities more often?
Observation #4
Building on the last point, it is clear that the action takers are “winning” - that is, around the world we can see that those regions that have implemented drastic measures very quickly, have been able to adjust their infection & transmission curves the fastest.
We have seen such positive responses where leaders have:
Taken heed of the stats in front of them,
Listened to the warnings and expertise of the World Health Organization,
Learned from how other earlier impacted regions are responding,
Implemented strong protective measures before their numbers climb, and
Clearly communicated with, educated and enabled their people (whether these are community members, business operators, or employees) to make rapid shifts.
We all can be leaders. We all have the ability to take action.
So, where should we go with all this? How we can use these insights?
Observations in the Mining Sector
It is interesting to note that generally the mining sector has actually shown all of the characteristics noted, for various situations and applications.
We are very in touch and involved with our local communities and our employees. Our focus on safety for all is very strong, and we typically work with our local stakeholders to address their needs. Many programs are in place to support remote education and training, as well as maximized local hiring. Mining organizations often facilitate local business development, and also introduce both infrastructure and technologies depending on regional and community-level needs. And finally, we have extensive programs and measures in place to reduce and manage our environmental risks. We are a safe, socially and environmentally responsible business.
We have shown our ability to be extremely resilient and responsive. Particularly when it comes to emergency situations, we are strong in addressing the immediate situation, to keep everyone as safe as can be throughout the incident, and to eliminate the risks associated with the final outcome. We have seen people jump in to help, doing what they can in the moment, even putting themselves in harm’s way, to do so. And we have seen people adjust their norms to manage in the aftermath, to help bring things back to a renewed form of control, of process.
On a broader scale, we know we are stronger when we collaborate to solve grand challenges. There are examples throughout industry where various companies have aligned and come together, or where companies have partnered with academic institutions and researchers or technology developers, to advance their processes or explore new solutions. There are even cross-industry examples of collaboration - such as in managing safety. We openly and willingly share statistics, incidents, strategies and lessons learned when it comes to safety. Because it is one thing we can truly all align on. So we KNOW it is possible because it has been done.
Finally, we know that companies that are performing the best are those that are taking a lead in looking at how business is done and adapting quickly according to the demands of society, the expectations of local communities, and in responding to innovative techniques available. These are the companies who are leading exploratory and experimental work in new technologies, and new ways of working. They are actually trying new things out.
Opportunities for the Mining Sector
There are a great many opportunities for the industry at this time, each promising greater data transparency and operational efficiency. Automation, AI, VR, and other digitalization aspects, are crowding our space and coming at us from every direction. So many opportunities to improve processes and create grand efficiencies within our operations.
Of course, there are challenges with implementing a lot of these without ensuring that we’ve addressed the people side of change first, and without learning how to integrate all of the changes that might be required for such projects. The systemic changes associated with such changes are much broader than one might realize on first glance. But this is not really what I’d like to discuss herein. It is another story for another time.
In my world, rather than look at optimizing existing operational processes - to increase our recoveries, or to reduce our costs, I see a greater need in altering how we design for, and manage mining wastes and their associated risks. Ultimately, the long term impacts to the surrounding environment, and the safety of people working or living downstream of our waste infrastructure, have a lot of reliance on what wastes we generate, their characteristics, and how we dispose of and store them.
Acknowledging that collaborative work has progressed in the past decade to capture best design practices, best management practices, and oversight needs to ensure we are being fully responsible, we still have much work to do. And while we have well-developed practices for reducing the potential for, and in dealing with, emergency conditions, unfortunately, it still seems that we wait for major incidents or failures to occur, or face significant pushes from external stakeholders and regulators, before we introduce changes that we could easily make now.
If we are truly putting safety and humans first - for those who work with us, and those who live and work around or downstream of us, we should easily see that their safety also drives the need for such changes.
How can we do it?
There are significant amounts of existing and ongoing:
data collection (waste characteristics, infrastructure stability performance, management practices, and more),
modelling of process, performance and design,
research on new technologies, and
even existing successful technologies requiring greater visibility and implementation.
All of this information, if compiled and made accessible for all to use, could help us to understand what we are dealing with, to make small and large operational improvements, broader scale changes to how we manage wastes, and different decisions for future development plans.
There are a large number of experts, each having knowledge from different parts of the industry, who could be brought together to look at the system, to see how different choices for waste management might make a beneficial impact to financial, environmental and even social impacts. I envision collaborative teams involving experts from geological, mining, processing, tailings management, risk management, dam design, environmental and social engagement backgrounds, as well as land / regional planners, community representatives, academics and regulators too.
Critical things that need to happen with such collaborative teams. We need to:
Ensure alignment on exactly what we’d like to achieve, and how we will evaluate and measure success,
Allow convergent thinking on all the possibilities and combinations of opportunities, listening to each and every person involved,
Divide the work of various ideas, so that several things can be investigated in parallel (excepting those things that we must do to gain the information in sequence to appropriately evaluate),
Allow experimentation, engage in open sharing of actions and results, and learn from both failures and successes, and
Co-create plans to move projects forward, once decisions are made on the best paths forward.
What each participant ends up contributing to the details becomes dependent on the opportunities uncovered. What decisions are made become dependent on being aligned on the objectives and how we measure. In all cases, the outcomes are much greater when we work together and share our learnings.
It is only in this way to make significant and rapid traction on industry-wide change.
In my opinion, our waste management objectives should be to stop building waste-retaining dams, to stop retaining wet materials, and to work towards creating additional value-add products from waste. Secondary to this, and in regard to any residuals we are left with, we should be designing and building dry, stable, compacted landforms (that might be used for various purposed in the long term), geoengineering all of the end products of our mining processes to do so. We should be doing all that we can to mimic the strengths of natural landforms within the region, so that they will stand against the natural elements of the local climate.
I am tired of hearing about the regularity of tailings dam failures, and I am really bothered by industry’s seeming acceptance of the rising levels of risk associated with our growing (in size, in volume, in height) waste infrastructure. I am distraught over the significant impacts (on the environment, and more importantly, on human lives) of the catastrophic failures that have been occurring of late, and for which we seem to be trending towards on a more frequent basis.
We shouldn’t have to be creating and managing massive risk management programs, nor practicing massive emergency and evacuation protocols, for materials that we produce. We have control on what we create, to a large degree, if not entirely. We have the power, and information, to make better decisions.
Finally, we claim to care about our humans, the environment, and put safety first. So why have we yet to change how we manage one of the biggest risks associated with our industry?
I’m willing to contribute to such programs associated with altering our waste management outlook, and even lead the portions that I am able. In fact, I’m already involved with tailings-related initiatives.
As incoming Chair of CIM ESRS, and a member of its Tailings Working Group, I have helped over the past several years to design and facilitate the CIM annual tailings management workshop, and to organize the waste and sustainability-related content for the annual conference.
I am a member of the GMPA Global Action on Tailings Canadian Task Force. To avoid duplication of efforts or overlap with other tailings initiatives on the go (there are lots focused on management components!), we are focusing on the specific outcomes I’ve already mentioned - the elimination of tailings and the need for tailings containment infrastructure.
I have included myself in the discussions around tailings initiatives being led by SME’s Tailings Working Group, and CIM ESRS is looking for opportunities to work together for various projects. Preliminarily, they have commenced dialogue around the creation of a Tailings Manual, which should be fairly comprehensive overall. Together, and contributing to the GMPA initiative, we are discussing the compilation of all published and recorded papers, webinars, training videos, etc. regarding tailings, to be hosted in one place.
I am also aware of other working groups within industry and Canadian collaborative groups such as MAC, COSIA, CMIC and CEMI, as well as research-focused teams with NRC and NRCan, who each have some focus on tailings and mine waste, zero waste, and/or value from waste. Internationally, ICMM and the Global Tailings Initiative are heavily focused on tailings management strategies.
I’d like to see more industry-wide collaboration on this front. My hope is to enable bringing all of the information from the various existing programs together.
But it takes a willingness to share. It takes a village of contributors, each bringing their knowledge. It takes alignment, effort and action, and it takes commitment to stick with a plan, so that once established, it actually advances.
Is anyone with me to move this forward?
Karen Chovan is the Principal of Enviro Integration Strategies and Vice Chair of CIM Environmental and Social Responsibility Society. She has worked for 20 years in the mining sector, focused on tailings and mine waste management, and sustainability practices, giving her insight into the challenges and opportunities for improvements that can be made in operations, projects, and corporate environments.