A group of investors led by the Church of England will crank up the pressure on mining companies that have failed to disclose detailed information on their waste dams by voting against directors and boards.
A year on from a deadly dam disaster in Brazil that claimed the lives of more than 250 people, Adam Matthews, director of ethics and engagement at the CofE, said it was “utterly unacceptable” that 10 of the world’s top 50 miners had not signed up to the first public database tracking tailings dams.
Mr Matthews said the Global Mining and Tailings Safety Initiative — an alliance of investors with more than $14tn of assets under management — would use their “votes” and “interventions” at annual meetings to put pressure on companies that had not joined the database, which was launched in London on Friday.
These include Russia’s Norilsk Nickel, Hindustan Zinc, which is majority owned by Vedanta, and the Chinese mining companies Shandong Gold Mining and Zijin Mining.
“A section of the mining community has taken it seriously . . . but we still have a long way to go,” said Mr Matthews, co-chair of the investor group. “This is a fundamental risk to us as investors.”
Tailings are waste material left over from mining activities. After extraction ore is crushed into sand-sized particles and mixed with water so that valuable metals and minerals can be extracted.
The remaining slurry is then pumped to a tailings storage facility. These are typically earth dams, which can range in size from no bigger than a swimming pool to covering more than 1,000 hectares, according to the International Council on Metal and Mining, an industry body developing a new standard for tailings dams.
About 45.7bn cubic metres of mining waste exists globally, equivalent to the volume of 11,447 Wembley Stadiums, according to the Global Mining and Tailings Safety Initiative.
The dam in Brazil that burst a year ago, unleashing a tidal wave of mud that destroyed a workers’ canteen, was holding 11.7m cubic metres of iron ore tailings — or almost 5,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools — and stood 86m high. The dam was part of a mining complex owned by Brazil’s Vale, the world’s biggest iron ore producer.
Waste management is an increasing challenge for the mining industry. As the world’s best deposits are depleted and grades decline, miners find themselves digging more ore from the ground to produce the same amount of metal.
The database launched on Friday holds the details of almost 2,000 dams disclosed by 98 mining companies, although Mr Matthews, who is co-chair of the group, estimated that 50,000 could exist globally.
“We don’t know how many there are out,” said Mr Matthews.
Norilsk Nickel, Hindustan Zinc, Shandong Gold Mining and Zijin Mining could not be reached for comment.
Over the next five years mining waste is expected to increase by 25 per cent, or the equivalent volume to another 2,728 Wembley Stadiums, according to the data from just the 98 mining companies.
Professor Elaine Baker of the University of Sydney, who helped create the database, said there were only 10 tailings dams from China included in the database because of a lack of response from Chinese companies.
“This is the tip of the iceberg in China in terms of the number of tailings storage facilities,” she said.
The investor group also used Friday’s event to call for the creation of a new global alert system for tailing dams and further work to identify and close the world’s most dangerous structures.
Earlier this week, the former chief executive of Vale Fabio Schvartsman was charged with homicide by prosecutors for his role in the dam disaster.
