Healthy Environment: Our zero waste vision

The United Nations predicts that, by 2050, nearly 2 billion people will be added to the world’s population – and we will use 71% more resources per capita.

These statistics and the second International Day of Zero Waste, which took place recently, have highlighted the need for all of us to up our game when it comes to managing waste – we need to treat waste as a resource and embrace the principles of the circular economy, creating more durable products and reusing, recovering, and recycling as much as possible.

At Anglo American we understand the need to deliver the materials society needs while protecting our planet: Healthy Environment is one of the three pillars of our Sustainable Mining Plan. We believe in the need for a more circular economy and the principles of circularity to help drive value in our business.

We want to avoid the production of waste in the first place. But we recognise that many mined materials, previously considered to be waste, may have value, or potential value.

Among those materials is waste rock, generated from traditional mining techniques. It’s one of the biggest circular economy opportunities for the industry. It can be transformed into construction materials, agricultural uses, metal recovery or carbon sequestration.

Last year in Brazil, we completed a successful pilot using tailings waste to produce paving blocks. We donated 57,000 paving blocks to the municipality of Alvorada de Minas, in central Minas Gerais, to pave a stretch of road. By the end of the year, a total of 230,000 blocks had been donated to the municipality, and we expect to do the same for other areas in the state in the future.

We are also exploring the possibilities of using mineral waste in agriculture and rehabilitation activities, through the creation of topsoil and the recovery of nutrients beneficial for plants. This work includes the collaboration we started in 2023 with the University of São Paulo to explore the feasibility of producing topsoil from waste streams produced at Minas-Rio. We will continue this work in 2024, exploring upscaling options.

Our support of a number of R&D (research and development) programmes continues. They investigate whether or not our mineral wastes can be used as substrate for enhanced rock weathering to sequester atmospheric carbon over long periods of time.

Harnessing potential

We have now run two rounds of CircuLab, a programme designed to encourage people in our organisation to develop ideas with the potential to move our business towards circularity and embrace the principles of the circular economy.

Projects ranged from creating sustainable uniforms for De Beers and eliminating single-use plastic from a site in Botswana to creating a circular economy programme for high school students and designing a sawdust recovery robot.

To complement CircuLab, we have designed a programme of online learning so that colleagues everywhere can explore the concept of circularity and learn how they can apply it.

Collaboration

We work with the Circulars Accelerator, a group that supports start-ups that work in the circular economy area. The partnership is led by Accenture and supported by ourselves, Ecolab, and AWS (Amazon Web Services). Hosted online by the World Economic Forum, the programme allows us to engage with some of the most innovative disruptors to help them overcome barriers, scale up their ideas and, where possible, collaborate.

In 2023 we joined the Circular Economy Working Group of the International Chamber of Commerce and took part in working groups with IRMA and World Resources Institute.

We are members of the Platform for Accelerating the Circular Economy and provided a speaker and panel member at the 2023 World Circular Economy Forum in Helsinki, one of the world's leading events devoted to the circular economy.

Progress

In 2023, our focus was on rolling out a Zero Waste toolkit to support sites to meet our zero waste vision and adapt good practices in waste management in a cohesive manner. The toolkit shares international best practice in waste management and provides site managers with the tools and resources to understand and manage non-mineral waste responsibly.

We continued to evolve our Group-wide dashboard to measure our non-mineral waste and improve our diversion rate, which measures the portion of waste not sent to landfill.

Also in 2023, we worked on improving our ability to collect accurate waste data and movements by carrying out a pilot of Topolytics, a digital waste management platform. The pilot was successful and the tool is now being used at our Woodsmith crop nutrients project, to prepare for upcoming UK legislation requiring waste data to be digitised.

Says principal, hazardous materials and non mineral waste, Johannes (JJ) Van Staden: “The focus on waste and materials will grow significantly over the next five years through a range of factors including cost pressures and more regulations. This includes the introduction of digital waste tracking and plastic taxes. Companies accessing capital markets will be expected to improve the quality and consistency of data, disclosure, and reporting. This applies equally to our approach to waste and recycling.”

Head of environmental emissions, Steve Hart, adds: "Our 2024 Group programmes underpin our opportunity to maximise the value of our materials through ensuring quality data and better understanding and tracking our material characteristics and movements.

“By integrating this data in innovative ways, we will reduce the cost, liability and potential environmental impacts of waste management at our operations. We are driven by our goals to re-imagine mining to improve people’s lives, driving towards circular solutions for our mines’ waste to create products for the community that we can also use to regenerate our mine sites to sustainable ecosystems.”