Anglo American is one of Chile’s leading copper producers, our major investments in the country’s copper mining industry being Collahuasi, exploiting one of the largest copper deposits in the world, located in the northeast of the country, and the important Los Bronces mine, which we majority-own, around 65 km by road from central Santiago.
Los Bronces came into production over 150 years ago and, because of its proximity to Santiago, the mine and its workforce have had a long association with Chile’s capital city.
As the city has grown – it now numbers more than 7 million people, well over a third of the country’s population – so have the expectations of its residents, including, rightfully, their demand for much more information about how we, as miners, operate, what our impacts are, and how we manage them.
In this constantly evolving world, Anglo American realised early on that, for us, innovation and technology must go hand in hand with sustainability – but also that this is not enough; our licence to continue to operate would also be dependent on how acceptable our activities are in the public domain.
That is why we developed several citizen-participation processes prior to and during the permitting process for our operational-continuity Los Bronces Integrated Project, so we could explain our plans and address community concerns.
