With environmental statistics pointing to a high probability that all marginal gold mines operating in the Western, Central and Eastern basins of the Witwatersrand mining complex will become insolvent in the next decade, environmental adviser Dr Anthony Turton states that the concept of ‘closure mining’ presents an opportunity for entrepreneurship and environment-friendly rehabilitation to emerge.

“In every problem lies an opportunity for an entrepreneur and, from this, the concept of closure mining emerged. It offers the real possibility of raising sufficient capital to fund the rehabilitation of mine-impacted landscapes, while creating jobs for the next 20 years as we soften the landing from a purely extractive economy in Gauteng,” he says.

Turton mentions that increasingly statistical, environmental and other evidence have collectively started to point to the high probability that gold mines could potentially be driven to insolvency. He adds that this high probability of failure implies that Johannesburg will be left with an environment in which dust originating from collapsing dumps will increasingly spread the 430 000 t of uranium that lies buried in them.

“The erosion of dumps by water will also spread this uranium into rivers and wetlands. Insufficient money has been set aside to remediate this landscape, so we face a bleak future if we do not actively intervene.

“Also, what the nonmining public does not realise is that the current mining legislation does not define a dump as waste. Rather, it is referred to as a resource that can potentially be used in future. No dump is ever in its final resting place, because it can, theoretically, be reprocessed in future as new technology emerges, so the limited capital set aside for rehabilitation cannot for that reason be released,” he explained.

Given these challenges, Turton says the idea of closure mining is to actively align the outcome of mining with the broader interests of society. To do this, the concept shifts from the ‘legal licence to mine’ to the ‘social licence to mine’.

“As a result, closure mining assumes that the dumps are now totally depleted so they need to be processed into their final resting place in order to permanently remove a persistent hazard.”

Although the cost of the concept is not too high as a result of its revenues being generated from gold recovery, Turton points out, the challenge currently is that there is a lot of investor sensitivity around South Africa, with most major foreign investors only interested in short-term investment that is easy to reverse.

“Therefore, the core challenge for the current government is creating policy that attracts long-term investments, as closure mining needs long-term investment to exist,” he adds.

Moreover, Turton notes that closure mining is a key element of the transition from an extractive to a beneficiation type of national economy. Closure mining is a way of internalising past externalities without asking the taxpayer to pay for the costs – therefore, it facilitates a smooth transition from extraction to beneficiation.