TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – Canadian diversified miner Teck Resources’ Cardinal River Operations (CRO), in Alberta, were on Monday bestowed with a special Towards Sustainable Mining (TSM) Leadership Award for outstanding performance in the initiative's three focus areas – environmental stewardship, communities and people, and energy efficiency.

The Mining Association of Canada’s (MAC’s) TSM Leadership Award is granted only when a facility meets or exceeds a level ‘A’ ranking in their results across all six performance areas of the TSM initiative (known as ‘protocols’). These comprise Aboriginal and community outreach, crisis management, safety and health, tailings management, biodiversity conservation management, and energy use and greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions management. A facility's TSM results had to be externally verified to be eligible for this recognition.

"We are pleased to recognise CRO with the TSM Leadership Award, which is an important and rare distinction that celebrates a facility for its achievements in the TSM initiative," MAC president and CEO Pierre Gratton said in a statement.

Teck president and CEO Don Lindsay presented CRO staff with the award at a recognition event on-site on Monday. Teck's CRO, which include the Luscar and Cheviot mines, were honoured with TSM Performance Awards for each of the six performance areas, as well as the TSM Leadership Award for its 2013 results. 

"This award reflects the commitment of the employees at CRO to engaging with communities, safeguarding the environment and working to continually improve our sustainability performance," Lindsay noted.

"At CRO, protecting the environment and working cooperatively with communities is part of our core business and we will continue to work hard to meet our sustainability goals," CRO GM Matt Cole said.

While Cardinal River's scores reflected leadership across all TSM performance areas, the facility stood out for demonstrating best practices in Aboriginal and community outreach, biodiversity conservation management, and energy use and GHG emissions management. In these areas, CRO achieved the highest possible ranking – level ‘AAA’ – across all of the indicators that made up these protocols.

Teck's CRO joined a small number of mine sites that had achieved this distinction in TSM's decade-long history, including Syncrude Canada's oil sands facility, awarded in 2007, Barrick Gold’s Hemlo mine, awarded in 2011, and Teck's Elkview operation, awarded in 2013.

CRO, with more than 340 employees, is located about 42 km south of Hinton, Alberta, and produces about 2.5-million tonnes a year of high-quality steelmaking coal.