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Over the past few years, my attention has turned from overall sustainability matters to how we can reduce the risks of mining wastes. There are many opportunities to create value from wastes, and to alter the way that wastes are managed in order to reduce long-term risks to the environment, as well as to society.
Bringing diverse minds together, and applying innovative solutions, we can find ways to eliminate the potential for catastrophic tailings dam failures.
Read MoreEveryone views waste as a cost centre. We move rock out of the way to get the good stuff. The shiny metals, the high-value gemstones, the money makers.
But what if we've had it wrong all this time and we just haven't been seeing the full potential held within the volumes of rock that we move?
Read MoreHow do we get more buy in to actually turning tailings wastes into a product?
Is there more opportunity to create products out of those things or have them used as some other sources of reclamation materials to stabilize other sites.
How do we encourage more collaboration on that front?
Read this article, based on sessions of the Mines and Technology conference held in Toronto, October 2-4, 2017, where a panel had a dialogue around this question.
Read MoreTailings. One of those parts of the mining business that everyone loves to hate.
External stakeholders see them as large, ugly ponds of toxic sludge, fearing their presence, fighting against their development. Not in my backyard.
And to the mining business, tailings make up a significant cost - unfortunately being something that no conventional mine has ever been able to eliminate.
So what can be done about it? Are there alternatives?
Read MoreI've always held the belief that mining is really a large-scale exercise in waste management (with the added benefit of gaining value from the ore being extracted!)...as natural ore deposits diminish in concentrations and we are having to dig deeper and deeper to access natural ore bodies, will we find a flipping point where recovery from man-made waste streams will become more economical than extracting from the earth?
I think so, and it will come sooner than we think!
Read MoreThere are two things that could have major impacts on improving the viability of mining projects:
1. Planning, developing and operating projects with the end-use, full closure design in mind (building it to progressively enable closure shortly following the end of operations of a mine), and
2. Flipping evaluation of a potential development on its head - evaluate the worth of the entire property - with value placed on every component of the system - including the overburden and "waste" materials being excavated and moved in order to reach that desired, valued ore. This is monetizing the waste streams that every operation generates - at the front-end planning and assessment phase.
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