Industry body International Council on Mining and Metals has released new tools aimed at helping mining companies improve their ‘circularity’.
ICMM’s ‘Tools for Circularity’ provides business cases for increasing circularity in the industry and shares good practice and detailed case studies from different operating contexts to help set approaches, from a corporate-level through to implementation at mining and metals operations.
Circularity refers to practices that optimise resource use and minimise waste across the entire production and consumption cycle, emphasising sustainability and economic efficiency. In mining, this is throughout every stage of the life cycle, from sourcing, to production, to use and recovery of metals and minerals.
The new tools highlight significant opportunities to boost material efficiency and minimise waste while creating new financial, social, and environmental value based around the re-mining of tailings, utilisation of by-products or the recovery and reprocessing of e-waste and zero emission vehicle batteries.
ICMM says by strengthening approaches to reducing emissions, tailings and other waste; optimising water usage; regenerating closed mine sites; valorising and recycling other waste such as tyres; and focussing on efficiency, the sustainability of materials entering value chains can be improved.
ICMM director of innovation Bryony Clear Hill says increasing the circularity of mining and metals value chains will help to sustainably and responsibly meet the growing demand for metals.
“ICMM’s members have been integrating circular principles at the site level for many years, in part to reduce any negative impacts of extraction but also because it makes good business sense,” Hill says.
“We hope that ICMM’s Tools for Circularity will enhance and widen companies’ existing approaches to help accelerate progress towards circular economies, and highlight opportunities to gain additional value through emerging opportunities such as the processing of secondary materials.”
Metals are durable materials that can be recycled almost indefinitely under the right conditions. For materials to be truly circular, both the way they are produced and consumed must be circular, ICMM notes.
Research shows that every year, some US$2.6 trillion worth of material in fast-moving consumer goods is thrown away or discarded and never recovered.
Circularity presents an alternative to the linear model. A circular economy means resources can be used over and over again, often for the same or similar purposes.
ICMM is focused on creating a collaborative space to ensure that the right conditions are in place to allow different types of circular strategies to be successful, including regulation, technology and low carbon energy availability and financing.
Write to Adam Orlando at Mining.com.au
Images: ICMM
