Sustainable mining is the buzzword for all industries depending on mined raw materials, especially the cement sector. It is, therefore, imperative that we take a closer look at its economic and environmental impact.
The focus on mining in the context of cement has more than one reason to be at the top of the agenda on sustainability. With the sheer growth of this sector as an extractive process that touches many aspects of the environment on the one hand, and leaves the livelihoods of the people associated in a state of quandary on the other, given that the life of the mine and that of the prosperity of the people get intertwined.
The narratives have changed from the mere lifecycle of the mineral deposit to the complete sustainability that includes an integrated and holistic approach to preclude economic, environmental and social value from mining and allied operations and supply chains for a large number of stakeholders.
Economic Repercussions
The prelude to this narrative is the understanding of stakeholder responsibilities at a time when some parts of the world, where the global extractive process for limestone, the key mineral for producing cement, has seen capacities being ramped up to serve the burgeoning rise of cement demand. As ballpark estimates suggest, for a 4 billion tonne cement output of the world, the limestone requirement stands at close to 2.8 billion tonnes, which is the highest mineral ore extracted every year from the deposits of the world, which happens to be the top cover of the earth’s surface.
Most of these deposits occur closer to forests, biodiversity and tribal populations, essentially places where economic progress has been slow. If one looks at the total extractive mineral output, one would be seeing a three-fold increase over the last four decades. From 1970 to 2017, the annual global extraction of materials tripled and the global use of materials is expected to more than double from 79 Gt in 2011 to 167 Gt in 2060. Minerals that are non-metallic, such as construction material, e.g., sand and gravel, represent more than half of the total use of materials by weight and their use is expected to grow rapidly in the coming years (from 35 Gt in 2011 to 82 Gt in 2060). Cement industry, coupled with the concrete that needs aggregates and sand, is a part of the extractive mining industry landscape, and thus the environmental and social impact of mining becomes a very important subject, if one adds these supply chains as well.
On the one hand, mining as an economic activity could be encouraging for the populace, it could end up with the ‘Resource Curse’ as well, as mines reach the end of cycle of the deposits. Thankfully at least for cement, we have a burgeoning downstream, mostly closer to the mining operations, where a vibrant downstream operation is established that employs larger sections of people and thus livelihoods are intertwined on a bigger scale through supply chains that crisscross. Apart from the building and construction industry, which requires 80 per cent of the extraction, we still have steel, agriculture and chemical Industries needing limestone mining for a number of reasons.
Keeping Track of Sustainability
Sustainability reporting, which is mostly voluntary reporting, is at the core of the sustainable initiatives, sometimes prompted by the Country Reporting guidelines and Environmental and Sustainability Goals (ESG) of 2015 or the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). The investors also demand more disclosure on Sustainability Initiatives with clear mandates that can be verified through trends and data. However, the 2018 Responsible Investing Survey and the 2020 Responsible Mining Index cites lack of quantity and quality in the reporting so far. Stakeholders increasingly require information on the environmental and social impacts of mining at the mine-site level, and presented in the local context. Sometimes there is little use to look at headline numbers aggregated over many sites across countries. Focus on site level reporting that gives periodic data on a host of environmental and social impact of mining becomes the important indicator of progress.
Some of the sustainability indicators at the site level include:
- Impact on biodiversity: Number/percentage of sites with biodiversity management plans
- Description of significant impacts on biodiversity: Amount of land disturbed or rehabilitated and information on the use of biodiversity offsets
- GHG emissions and energy use: Amount of CO2e GHG emissions and mitigation measures and energy consumption and reductions
- Water management: Amount of water withdrawal by source and water sources significantly affected by withdrawal of water
- Health and safety: Number of accidents/deaths, information on training on health and safety management security / human rights and rights of indigenous peoples
- Number/percentage of reserves in or near areas of conflict: Number/percentage of reserves in or near indigenous lands and engagement processes in place
- Processes in place to prevent child or forced labour and impact on local communities and local community engagement
- Number of operating sites where resettlement took place, number of households resettled in each site and information on how their livelihoods were affected in the process
- Number/percentage of operations with local community engagement (including minority groups such as women), and/ or environmental/social impact assessments
- Number/percentage of operations with significant negative impacts on local communities – Proportion of spending on local suppliers
Apart from these, water and air quality and gender diversity in mining operations have become important pointers as well. For mining operations in cement, site remediation and rehabilitation become an area of focus as many mines have reached their end of life. One of the ways to enforce this has been to enforce some of these at the inception of the Environment Impact Assessment and Mining Permit stage itself. With the lack of site-specific reporting as evidenced in almost 90 per cent of the mining sustainability reporting, corporate level reporting is only a high-level aggregation of most of data, masking site level inadequacies, which has been pointed out in both the Responsible Investing Survey and Sustainable Mining Index 2020.
If one looks at the expansion of the scope for the building and construction industry, where only a smaller part is covered under the cement-limestone mining operations and the larger part falls under aggregates and sand mining operations, which remains uncovered by sustainability reporting as most of these fall under small scale industry structure,
absolving them of the detailed disclosure requirements. It is therefore to be concluded that for most developing nations, we still have a long way to progress as far as sustainable mining operations are concerned. The entire supply chain of mining operations for concrete / building and construction industry must be looked at where the suppliers of sand, gravel and aggregates must be brought under the same purview and this leaves a lot to be desired as these
supply chains have third party sourcing activities lacking the rigour of the bigger corporate entities like cement companies.
-Procyon Mukherjee