The rehabilitation toolbox for the closure and rehabilitation of mining operations being developed by engineering and infrastructure advisory services company Aurecon aims to enable a mine’s management to plan effectively for and mitigate the environmental and community impact of a shuttered mine, while hopefully reducing the impact on the bottom line.
The development of this toolbox started during a ‘Close your mine while improving your bottom line’ workshop facilitated by the company in Brisbane, Australia, at the end of September, aimed at bringing together different industry stakeholders with diverse perspectives to explore new solutions with the potential to create revenue from mine closures that would incentivise a change in mining companies’ approach to closure.
Aurecon associate Pieter Scholtz says the intention of the workshop was to apply design methodologies to imagine an end state for mining operations in which mine closure actually adds value to the mining companies’ financial bottom line, “especially in light of the global economic slump”.
He explains that one of the biggest aspects influencing mine closure is the sustainability of the mining villages and communities that have developed around a mine.
Aurecon’s rehabilitation toolbox hopes to address the sustainable management of these communities through innovative solutions that are both socially responsible and financially attainable.
“Mines need to know how to incorporate their mining villages into the relevant municipalities and how to identify sustainable initiatives to ensure they remain functional and that the towns are not abandoned once the mine has closed, while taking into consideration the requirements of South Africa’s Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Act,” says Scholtz.
He explains that, because of the shortage of adequate good housing in South Africa, the onus now falls on mining companies to ensure the villages built for their employees can be sustained beyond the closure of the mine.
Owing to many mines being far away from large commercial hubs, “the general problem is that, when a mine closes, there is no comparable size economy left to support the community or attract other people to those villages”.
Processing plants, mines and tailings dumps all form part of a mine closure and rehabilitation plan and the intent of Aurecon’s closure toolbox is to have a workable framework detailing the factors that need to be considered by using design to innovate principles.
“Rehabilitation and sustainability are fundamentally different for each mine, even when mines are located adjacent to each other. Therefore, applying the same approach for every mine is never going to work. The closure toolbox will detail the information each mine must consider,” Scholtz says.
He points out that, for a mining company, the rehabilitation and closure of a mine generally is a “grudge purchase” that does not add value to the mining company’s bottom line and requires significant capital expenditure.