SWITCHING ON SUSTAINABLE MINING
“ The mining industry has to be very careful about how its perceived , because its perceived generally very negatively ”
the technology , if you can actually understand them geologically , what does it take for that new mining approach to actually work in practice ?”
There ’ s a widespread , blanket perception that mining is an unethical practice . While working in on the IMP @ CT project , what has been your experience of this ?
It ’ s a huge issue and particularly for Europe , it on the top five challenges facing the mining community . In terms of accidents and environmental contamination , if you look at the statistics , it ’ s not actually the worst industry out there . However , when incidents do happen , they have the tendency to be absolutely awful . The mining industry has to be very careful about how its perceived , because its perceived generally very negatively . There ’ s good reasons for it - obviously we have the occasional catastrophic incident .
Historically , where mining was operating in societies that didn ’ t have environmental protection and through the industrial revolution it was all about people having jobs and staying alive basically . There weren ’ t the same checks and balances as we had now . The problem that we have now is that the checks and balances we have in place are very different in different places in the world . Mining communities that are based in Canada , Australia and Europe are very conscientious and like to employ best practice , but that isn ’ t the case across the globe , so you need to think very carefully about the whole
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