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Green Mining

From moonscapes to Edens: What to do with your hole in the ground when the mining’s done – by Amanda Stutt (Northern Miner – July 22, 2024)

https://www.northernminer.com/

Telling the stories of reinvented coal mining regions, regenerated communities and rebuilt ecosystems, a new book published this month – 102 Things to Do with a Hole in the Ground – showcases remarkable post-mining reclamation projects around the world.

The book is a sequel to the original 101 Things to Do with a Hole in the Ground, published in 2009 by the Eden Project — a UK-based example of successful mine site transformation. The Eden Project successfully turned the site of former clay mines in Cornwall, UK, into a thriving botanical garden housed by geodesic domes designed by Grimshaw Architects.

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Rio Tinto completes largest off-grid solar plant build in Canada’s north – by Staff (Mining.com – July 2, 2024)

https://www.mining.com/

Rio Tinto (ASX: RIO) said on Tuesday its 100% owned Diavik diamond mine in Canada’s Northwest Territories (NWT) has successfully completed the installation of its 3.5 megawatt capacity solar power plant.

The project represents the largest off-grid solar power plant across Canada’s territories, the Australian miner said. The Diavik mine is located about 200 kilometres south of the Arctic Circle, at the bottom of Lac de Gras.

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Vale showcases greenhouse that helped regreen Sudbury – by Len Gillis (Northern Ontario Business – June 12, 2024)

https://www.northernontariobusiness.com/

Company celebrates 50th anniversary of the Godfrey Drive greenhouse that helped the massive Sudbury regreening project

For more than half a century, Vale’s greenhouse on Godfrey Drive in Copper Cliff has been making a beautiful contribution to the community. Vale Base Metals held a celebration June 6 to mark 50 years for the greenhouse in Copper Cliff and the company’s contribution to the regreening of Sudbury.

The facility on Godfrey Drive was built 50 years ago by INCO, but a previous company greenhouse existed in Copper Cliff before that, providing plants and seedlings throughout the community.

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Ten million trees really made a difference to Sudbury’s landscape – by Mary Katherine Keown (Sudbury Star – June 8, 2024)

https://www.thesudburystar.com/

And about half those trees came from seedlings grown by Vale and its greenhouse in Copper Cliff

More than 10 million trees have been planted as part of Greater Sudbury’s regreening efforts, and Vale (formerly Inco) is responsible for nearly half of those seedlings. They started out tinier than a thumbnail, but 50 years later, the first trees that were planted are now soaring into the sky, covered in needles or leaves, and providing shade, nourishment and homes to all kinds of critters.

About five million of those seedlings got their start at the Vale greenhouse in Copper Cliff. A large group, including children from the nearby elementary school, gathered at the greenhouse on Thursday to celebrate its 50th birthday.

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NEWS RELEASE: Vale Base Metals Greenhouse Celebrates 50th Anniversary (June 7, 2024)

Sudbury, June 07, 2024 – Yesterday in Copper Cliff, representatives from Vale Base Metals and the community joined to mark the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Vale Base Metals’ greenhouse. Over its long history, the greenhouse has been responsible for growing approximately 5 million seedlings within the City of Sudbury.

The Greenhouse opened on February 14, 1974, to provide a space to house tropical plants for use in displays and temperate plants for indoor and outdoor use. It also helped facilitate agricultural research, including studies on the effects of chemical growth on tailings and the germination of legumes for use in land reclamation.

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Regreening Sudbury: VETAC at 50 – work still to be done – by Hugh Kruzel (Sudbury Star – October 25, 2023)

https://www.thesudburystar.com/

‘I am really quite amazed by what has happened when you spread some limestone’

Growing up in Sudbury many of us — as teens — roamed across a countryside made barren, blackened and rocky due to years of mining and smelting operations. The more recent generations, however, would have to go looking for examples that remain of that time.Revegetation programs have residents and visitors once again seeing a rolling verdant landscape.

“I am really quite amazed by what has happened when you spread some limestone,” said Peter Beckett, Laurentian University professor emeritus of reclamation, restoration and wetland ecology, and chair of the VETAC regreening advisory panel. “Like magic. Who would have thought?”

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Regreening an example of what gives Jane Goodall hope – by Hugh kruzel (Sudbury Star – June 1, 2023)

 

https://www.thesudburystar.com/

‘Yelling at CEOs doesn’t work. Instead plant a seed,’ says famous activist, on hand to promote new doc at Science North

All seats were filled at Science North’s IMAX cinema as Jane Goodall arrived to share her new film Reasons for Hope. The legendary primatologist, now 88, has put Sudbury prominently on the world stage. The city’s regreening effort is one of the inspiring tales told in the documentary — a success story she wants to share with a wider audience.

Drone footage in the film goes from black, industrially damaged landscapes to carpets of forests. Healthy lakes, echoing with the call of loons, are seen from the perspective of a canoe.

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How abandoned mines can become clean energy storage systems – Staff (Mining.com – January 17, 2023)

https://www.mining.com/

An international team of researchers has developed a novel way to store energy by transporting sand into abandoned underground mines. The new technique, called Underground Gravity Energy Storage (UGES), proposes an effective long-term energy storage solution while also making use of now-defunct mining sites.

In a paper published in the journal Energies, the scientists explain that UGES generates electricity when the price is high by lowering sand into an underground mine and converting the potential energy of the sand into electricity via regenerative braking and then lifting the sand from the mine to an upper reservoir using electric motors to store energy when electricity is cheap.

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The race to mine mining waste – by John Lorinc (Corporate Knights – January 9, 2023)

https://www.corporateknights.com/

Could metal-eating bacteria that break down mining waste be key to sustainable battery minerals?

For generations, the topography of Sudbury, Ontario, has been brutally defined by towering slag heaps and vast orange-hued tailings ponds – the physical legacy of almost 140 years of nickel mining and smelting by resource giants like Inco and Falconbridge.

By 1910, in fact, Sudbury’s mines were supplying 80% of the world’s nickel. But by the late 20th century, the industrial fallout – corrosive air pollution, acid rain and a legacy of seemingly intractable contamination – revealed the extraordinary environmental cost of those resource riches.

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Investors look for green ways to cash in on battery metals boom – by Kenza Bryan and Harry Dempsey (Financial Post/Financial Times – January 9, 2023)

https://financialpost.com/

Tainted by decades of environmental disasters, shattered communities and ravenous water consumption, mining companies — including those that dig up battery metals — are not traditional darlings of the environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) crowd.

Veteran mining executive Sir Mick Davis — who led the resources company Xstrata PLC until its merger with Glencore PLC in 2013 — knows this all too well. Now running Vision Blue Resources Ltd., a fund focused on clean-energy-related mineral and metal companies, he’s looking to ride a new wave in the sector as it seeks to up its game on sustainability while meeting huge demand for battery metals.

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Demand for green metals from recycling expected to grow – report – by Valentina Ruiz Leotaud (Mining.com – May 29, 2022)

https://www.mining.com/

As the ESG spotlight shifts onto the mining and metals sector, there is increased interest in recycling as a source of green metals, a recent report by White & Case states.

According to the law firm, the ideas around the circular economy, where all aspects of the economy are repurposed and/or reused, align well with recycling, while relatively high commodity prices also make the often resource-intensive process of sorting and processing scrap more economically viable.

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The Drift: Trees, bees, fish and seeds: Vale’s biodiversity initiatives helping to recharge Sudbury’s landscape – by Lindsay Kelly (Northern Ontario Business – March 22, 2022)

https://www.northernontariobusiness.com/

Modest greenhouse in city’s Copper Cliff neighbourhood is at the heart of unique reclamation program

On a cool, mid-winter morning, the outside temperature in Copper Cliff, just outside of Sudbury, has dipped to -10 and a fresh coat of newly fallen snow is blanketing the area. But inside the greenhouse owned by nickel miner Vale, it’s a balmy 29 degrees.

It’s rare for international mining companies to have greenhouses listed among their assets, but from the glass-walled facility, nestled at the end of a cozy street in a residential neighbourhood, Vale has happily been churning out thousands of tree seedlings annually since the 1950s.

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Sudbury Accent: LU researcher tackles ‘the next frontier’ of Sudbury’s regreening program – by Colleen Romaniuk (Sudbury Star – October 22, 2021)

https://www.thesudburystar.com/

A researcher at Laurentian University’s Living with Lakes Centre is planting the seeds for a more sustainable and environmentally friendly land reclamation process.

Jonathan Lavigne has partnered with Collège Boréal to explore the potential for pulp and paper mill waste and municipal biosolids as an alternative to the lime and fertilizer method of treating soils damaged by years of acid rain deposition.

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How metals and mining companies are adapting to a greener world – by Nathaniel Bullard (Bloomberg News – October 21, 2021)

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/

The metals and mining sector is a massive resource producer and a massive resource consumer. It exhumes raw materials and transforms them, through energy-intensive processes, into the modern features of our built environment.

In so doing, it also creates about a quarter of the reported emissions of the world’s 12,000 largest companies. As with other hard-to-abate sectors like cement production, or marine shipping, significantly lowering the emissions profiles of metals and mining will be crucial to meaningfully decarbonizing the global economy.

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Laurentian University cuts world-renowned programs – by Albrecht I. Schulte-Hostedde (Sudbury Star – April 28, 2021)

https://www.thesudburystar.com/

Sudbury is known as the city of lakes and for its famous regreening programs, yet university is slashing expertise in those areas as it restructures

Among the programs closed in Laurentian University’s “restructuring” were environmental science, environmental studies, ecology and restoration biology.

In a city of lakes, where Sophie Mathur has galvanized global youth around the climate crisis, where the regreening of the region has reached near mythological status, an undergraduate student cannot enter into an environmental or ecology program at Laurentian University.

Think about that. Why were Laurentian’s environmental and ecology programs closed?

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