The mining industry needs to make a quantum change, South African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (SAIMM) past president Dr Gordon Smith said last week.
Smith, who is also executive technical head of Anglo American Platinum, urged the industry to rebuild solutions fundamentally and avoid mere replication.
“I don’t think we’re pushing the limits far enough around the application of technology,” he told a mine planning session organised by the SAIMM in conjunction with the University of the Witwatersrand’s School of Mining Engineering.
“We’ve actually got to go through a personal philosophy change that avoids simply replicating what we have been doing before.
“We’ve got to make a quantum change . . . we’ve got to recraft solutions,” said Smith, who has 34 years of experience across the mining industry, in commodities including base metals, chrome, diamonds and coal.
South Africa needed to overcome its challenges and move forward.
“We still have some significant hurdles to overcome, but that’s simply what we do. We have a history of overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds,” Smith recalled.