Last Monday, the Denver Mining Club had a guest speaker, Maureen Upton, a consultant for Resource Initiatives, LLC. Her talk was on “Sustainability Issues in Mining.” My interest was triggered because I worked at Kennecott Greens Creek Mine, on Admiralty Island near Juneau, Alaska when they were completing procedures to comply with an ISO 14000. I also worked for Golden Star Resources, LTD and witnessed their investment of money, human-endeavor, and materials to provide sustainable economic means to the local communities in their area of interest along the Ashanti Gold trend in West Ghana. I am familiar with the tremendous effort a mining company initiates to provide sustainability at their operations. However, until Maureen’s talk, I had no idea the number of sustainable doctrines that are out there let alone the nature of these ideals.
The guys at the Denver Mining Club sometimes fixate on a particular facet of some other topic unrelated to the talk — and I love that about this club. Their digressions are both interesting and amusing. They become riled up and are not necessarily politically correct. Sometimes, they seem to forget the women in the room. Vocabulary and topics can get vulgar. If you let them go on, they might denounce or eviscerate or harangue organizations until you can see spittle in the corner of their frothing mouths. Well, maybe not that intensely but certainly with heart-felt conviction. Their articulated opinions are usually right on, except for not keeping on topic with the speaker (one time some of them voiced the opinion that women are bad luck underground, which if I were trapped alive with them, that might be bad luck indeed…)
Thus, I felt Maureen might have been surprised when at the end of her talk some of the members began yammering about cyanide and who in the heck came up with the idea that cyanide is so dangerous that it has to be banned and do you know how many people died of cyanide in the US last year – only guys on death row and people who think cyanide is polluting the environment need to take a look where their electricity comes from… Maureen was pinned by her foot to the floor. She maintained a look of professional composure but I could sense she might be thinking, ‘How in the heck did they come up with – she was there to take the cyanide away?’
Eventually, the talk came around to sustainability and why she was there. What I got out of it was probably a bit more than even Maureen intended — that is in large corporations there are many departments auxiliary to actually getting the resource out of the ground – departments for PR, departments for HR, departments for SOX (Sarbannes Oxley litigation), etc. Now, I see a future department of Sustainability. All those persons, paperwork, filing cabinets, computers and office space go into the price of bringing the resource to market.
Sustainability: it’s here to stay. Sustainability is a code of ethics for operating within logical, humane, environmentally conscientious bounds – codes that are put together by thoughtful organizations all over the world — AND — sustainability costs money. It costs money to operate within those globally friendly boundaries. So be it… if that’s the future of modern mining, then we have to go there.
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