Jacqui Coombes, CEO | Amira Global
My wedding ring is a symbol of my love for my dearest life partner. It serves no other purpose, and certainly no utilitarian purpose. And yet, I know that ounce for ounce behind my beautiful symbol of love, my ring is responsible for 2 to 5 cubic meters of tailings sitting somewhere, risking someone, and going nowhere with our current industry approaches to tailings.
When I extend this thinking to the technology and equipment that surrounds me, I am stunned by the potential scale of my personal tailings’ footprint.
So how do we contemplate addressing our shared tailings footprint, acknowledging that each of us holds indirect links to this, our industry’s greatest legacy challenge?
One way is to seek breakthroughs within a shared collaborative framework. This is the fundamental basis for an Amira Tailings Collaboration that has joined forces to take a lead in transforming the Tailings landscape.
Amira’s Minerals Operator Members together are accountable for nearly 60% of the world’s planned tailings facilities for 2025. From this group, Amira has established a Tailings Collaboration. Together this collaboration is accountable for 35% of the planned tailings volume across the globe in 2025. This accountability cuts across commodities, continents and countries (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Amira Collaboration’s Global Footprint
The consequences associated with the volumes within the collaborator’s facilities are dominated by high consequence categories (Figure 2). Three quarters of the collaboration’s planned tailings volume for 2025 is recognised as in the high consequence category, which serves to highlight the enormity of the responsibility we all carry as an industry and as a society, and the emphasis the collaboration is placing on seeking submissions in Amira’s call for R&D+I2 call for short form proposals in theme of “Avoiding catastrophic failure”.
Figure 2: Amira Collaboration’s Volume by consequence
In addition to this theme, the collaboration is seeking submissions in the themes that focus on reducing tailings volume – in creation and through repurposing.
We welcome submissions across the spectrum of research, development, innovation and implementation. Find out more here.
Submissions of current technology and innovations from Amira’s supplier Members are also sought.
Amira is excited about connecting and creating pathways to accelerate breakthroughs to our industry’s tailings mega-challenge.
