Every year on 30 March, we mark the UN’s International Day of Zero Waste with our commitment to embedding circular economy principles across the company, minimising waste in all its forms and making the most of our materials and assets to drive positive outcomes and to stimulate collaboration across value chains. To achieve this, we use an innovative partnership approach to unlock opportunities that reduce waste in our products and optimise mining processes to improve materials handling and waste management.
Our approach to circular economy principles in action
Over the past few years, our operations in Brazil have been applying circular economy principles in the treatment of material traditionally dismissed as waste. At our Minas-Rio iron ore operation, we have partnered with a local paving-block maker and a construction company to turn waste from tailings into materials that can benefit the surrounding communities.
In 2024, 293,000 paving blocks were produced from mining waste – all of which were donated by Minas-Rio to the municipalities of Alvorada de Minas, Serro and Conceição do Mato Dentro cities, near our operations. The entire consignment of paving blocks is currently being installed by local government to upgrade previously unpaved access roads, and by year-end 2024, more than $170,000 had been spent with local suppliers involved in the manufacturing of the paving blocks.
Find out more in our 2024 Sustainability Report.
In Chile, in another significant step towards promoting circular economy principles across our operations, a new road constructed from over 95% tailings and slag was inaugurated at the Las Tórtolas plant at our Los Bronces operation in Chile. The internal service road – 500 metres long and nine metres wide – is a testament to the potential of reusing mining waste safely and effectively.
The project is part of a wider study that is under way to evaluate copper and iron ore tailings as potential construction materials, aiming to reduce our mining footprint and decrease cement requirements, contributing to a lower-carbon impact.
Read more about the road constructed from mining waste.
In other initiatives, we continue to investigate the suitability of our mineral wastes as substrate for enhanced rock weathering to sequester atmospheric carbon over long periods of time, as well as exploring the potential use of mineral waste in agriculture and rehabilitation activities, focusing on creating nutrient-rich topsoil and recovering plant-beneficial nutrients. This effort has included laboratory-scale studies, in collaboration with the University of São Paulo, to develop topsoil material from various mineral and processing wastes produced at our Minas-Rio iron ore mine.
