Risk
When most miners think about tailings, they think about storage, risk management, and rehabilitation, but at the Life of Mine | Mine Waste and Tailings Conference 2025 in Brisbane, Clem Cahill, technical director - tailings at GHD, showed how the Kara Mine flipped that thinking on its head - turning its own waste stream into a high-performance construction material.
When Anton Kirsten took the stage at the Life of Mine | Mine Waste and Tailings 2025 conference in Brisbane, he wasted no time outlining a problem that’s been quietly growing into a full-blown crisis: there simply aren’t enough Engineers of Record (EoRs) to go around.
Henry Dillon, Global Customer Success Manager - Geoscience at Maptek, used his time on stage at APCOM2025 in Perth to challenge one of the industry’s most entrenched habits - treating resource models as static snapshots.
Tailings monitoring is a lot like health care - when it’s reactive, it can cost you dearly, but when it’s proactive, structured and consistent, it becomes a powerful tool for preventing failure, demonstrating stewardship, and building long-term confidence in your facility.
In a sector where “take-or-pay” contracts have long dictated how miners move their commodities, one new entrant is promising a more flexible model that puts the needs of producers first.
A cloud-hosted machine learning model, linked securely to a plant control system, has helped eliminate costly surging in dense medium cyclones - and in one case, safeguarded millions in weekly coal revenue.
AI can transform mining operations, but as Dr Penny Stewart warns, its real value will only be unlocked if the technology is transparent, tested and trusted.
New rules, stricter enforcement and a state-wide crackdown are forcing South Australian mines and quarries to radically rethink how they manage crystalline silica exposure - or risk being shut down.
For an industry under mounting scrutiny and regulatory oversight, there is perhaps no role more critical - or misunderstood - than that of the Engineer of Record (EoR).
In the wake of evolving regulatory expectations and maturing risk management frameworks, mining companies are being urged to reassess how they apply critical controls to tailings storage facilities (TSFs).
