Often, the stories we tell ourselves have the greatest impact on the decisions we make. For example, the story we hear about mining is often inherently bad. This can lead to mining projects being halted or opposed.
I believe it is easy to dismiss mining when most of the world lives far from the resources it consumes, but this narrative takes for granted the quality of life mining provides and, more importantly, the potential it gives for a sustainable future.
Getting young people interested in adding value to society through the mining industry is something Marcelo Santos, General Manager of Digital Technologies, Nexa Resources thinks about a lot. Besides supervising, implementing, and maintaining the company’s computing needs, Santos’ role is to attract and retain the right talent to keep operations running smoothly. Not only that – his team must be agile and skillful enough to successfully navigate the monumental changes facing the industry.
“We have to make mining more attractive to the TikTok generation,” said Marcelo Santos, General Manager of Digital Technologies, Nexa Resources, at SAP’s recent International Conference for Mining and Metals. “These are people with university degrees who can change the world.”
https://www.investorschronicle.co.uk/
To counter its negative public image, mining markets itself as a means to global advancement. Unfortunately, the industry often fails to make the case without sliding into jargon
Mining is polarising, no doubt. On one hand, the slick slideshows of the majors paint an image of open-air metal factories, where operational excellence limits danger and environmental damage is kept to a minimum.
On the other hand, general punters might still imagine the world of Poldark, where men chip away at rocks underground for a few months before they are crushed to death.
Northern Miner
Jean-Marc Lieberherr readily concedes that the industry he represents and speaks for – global diamond mining – has an image problem. “There are so many misconceptions about diamond mining,” says Lieberherr, chief executive officer of the Belgium-based Diamond Producers Association.
“Issues from the 1990s, like conflict diamonds that funded several African civil wars, are real scars in the history of the industry.” Much has changed within the industry over the past 20 years.
In 2003, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution establishing the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, which aimed at preventing conflict diamonds from entering the mainstream rough diamond market. And by July 2013, some 54 participants from 81 countries had endorsed the Kimberley Process.
CAPE TOWN, Feb 6 (Reuters) – The response to the horrendous dam collapse at a mine owned by Brazil’s Vale has focused on iron ore prices and how a disaster that will likely claim more than 300 lives occurred, and what must be done to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
These are valid concerns, but the risk of focusing on the immediate issues is that the much larger problems of the mining industry are once again glossed over. Namely that miners aren’t trusted and suffer from a serious image problem.
It may seem somewhat trivial to talk about image in the face of such a human tragedy, but mining’s poor image across a range of stakeholders is the major issue for the industry.
His comments came days after an EY survey of 250 mining executives found more
than half now considered licence to operate the biggest risk to their businesses
amid rising nationalism, changing community perceptions of mining operations and
the impact of automation on the workforce.
Rio Tinto iron ore boss Chris Salisbury says the mining industry has a trust problem with the Australian public as the company continues to put a heavy emphasis on shoring up its social licence to operate and pushes towards an autonomous future. The 30-year industry veteran said Rio Tinto, along with other miners, needed to change and adapt to ensure its future was as strong as its past.
Mr Salisbury said he agreed with critics calling on miners to be more diverse, inclusive and progressive, but said many observers wouldn’t even know that Rio Tinto contributed $42.7 billion to GDP, or 2.5 per cent of Australian economy, last year and paid $5 billion in tax and royalties.
“In an industry that is built on the goodwill and trust of governments and communities, we need to positively engage with our neighbours and the broader community to tell our story better,” he said.
In many ways the mining industry is losing the public relations battle
against environmental activists. Many of the latter fail to distinguish
between the various types of commodities being mined, the processes
being used in extraction and the usefulness of the resource in
helping, or hindering, action against climate change.
MELBOURNE, Oct 31 (Reuters) – The mining industry wants to shed its image as a low-tech shoveller of dirt and instead be seen as a cutting edge digital-savvy employer of choice. It’s a feat that could be compared to teaching an elephant to ballet dance.
While mining companies have been quick to adopt new technologies to drive costs lower, there is an increasing recognition that the industry needs to embrace the so-called digital revolution if it is to prosper in the future.
This means moving well beyond the driverless trains and trucks that have helped Australia’s major iron ore miners cut the cost of producing a tonne of the steel-making material by about two-thirds over the past decade.
Mining companies need to work harder to “change the barbecue conversation” and start restoring the level of public trust in the industry, says the head of Australian mining giant Rio Tinto.
“Mining is absolutely vital and this won’t change anytime soon,” Rio Tinto’s chief executive, Jean-Sebastien Jacques, will tell an industry conference on Tuesday. “But, I hate to tell you, our industry is one of the least-trusted on the planet.”
In an address to be delivered to the International Mining and Resources Conference in Melbourne, Mr Jacques says it is a crucial time in the development of the mining industry – a time when protecting the environment is more important than ever, when technology is disrupting traditional processes, and when a lack of trust in business is creating even more questions about the benefits of the corporate sector, “including mining and the contribution we make”.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/
If you are rich, restless and want to reinvent your career as, say, a movie mogul, Villa TreVille can provide plenty of inspiration. Plastered on Italy’s Amalfi Coast, next to the village of Positano, it was the home of famed Italian film director Franco Zeffirelli, who played host to some of the greatest artistic talent of the sixties, seventies and eighties – Federico Fellini, Elizabeth Taylor, Leonard Bernstein, Rudolf Nureyev, Maria Callas, Leonard Cohen, the Beatles – in the villa’s fairy-tale gardens and terraces.
Today, the great muses have largely disappeared from the villa’s guest roster, but the artistic tradition remains. The villa is where Robert Friedland, the Canadian-American founder and executive co-chairman of Vancouver’s Ivanhoe Mines Ltd., is contemplating his new career as a film producer and celebrating the success of Crazy Rich Asians, the new hit movie co-produced by Ivanhoe Pictures. He happens to own Villa TreVille.
“This is heaven,” he says, perched on a high terrace that overlooks the Mediterranean Sea, the town of Positano – which cascades like a waterfall down impossibly steep cliffs – and the Amalfi Drive, the narrow, terrifying road that was built by Joseph-Napoléon Bonaparte, the king of Naples and Sicily and older brother of the emperor.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/
Shannon VanRaes is a Winnipeg-based journalist who covers agriculture and agribusiness.
It’s quite possibly the most cliché phrase heard in agricultural circles these days. Attend any producer meeting or commodity conference and you’ll hear an overpaid speaker urging farmers to “tell their story” in order to better engage urban audiences.
“City dwellers think milk comes from the grocery stores! Can you believe it! Urbanites don’t understand where food really comes from! Without us, cities would starve! You have a good story to tell! You just need to find common ground!”
But in between the go-to lines so often uttered in rural echo chambers, there is something less than genuine poking through, something that goes beyond city-mouse and country-mouse territory.
NONPROFIT AIMS TO EDUCATION MINNESOTA ON MINING’S IMPORTANCE
When Cindy Stene drives across the Iron Range these days, she becomes rather emotional. During a recent trip from Grand Rapids to Ely to Gilbert and back, “I had tears in my eyes — seeing all the signs that have sprung up,” she said.
She’s talking about “Iron Range Proud” yard signs. Displayed prominently under the word “PROUD” is the hashtag: #fight4miningMN. Stene and 12,000 of her closest friends have been fighting that fight together now for a good year and a half.
Though she lives in Grand Rapids, Stene’s family has called the Ely and Babbitt areas home. And she, along with Joe Baltich, owner of Red Rock Wilderness Store and Northwind Lodge near Ely, joined forces to get the ball rolling on a fight that’s improtant to so many.
There’s nothing like jumping into a river at the head of a waterfall—especially the Zambezi above the hundred-plus-metre drop of Victoria Falls while an airborne crew films the stunt for television—to grab people’s attention. That’s the sort of thing Iain Stewart has done, but as a means to an end.
A geologist with a gift for communication, he evidently has a mission to express a sense of wonder in the science and its importance to people’s lives. But what about all those other geos lacking the resources of network TV or the advantages of charisma? Stewart discussed that in a June 18 public event at the first-ever Resources for Future Generations conference in Vancouver.
A professor of geoscience communication and director of the Sustainable Earth Institute at Plymouth University, Stewart’s best known for several BBC documentary series that bring geology to a broad mainstream audience.
“To many of the millennial generation, the mining industry
is the perfect whipping boy when environmental degradation
is being discussed. It helps that broadcasters on radio and
Tv have access to footages of Irresponsible practices of some
miners, and these are broadcast for millions to see, over
and over again.
It helps too that over the years miners never had a reason
to spend on advertising and talk about their CSR projects –
long before even the phrase “corporate social responsibility”
was even coined.”
OVER the last few months, traditional news and social media have been filled with news reports and commentary on fake news or false news and how it has impacted so many publics worldwide.
It has helped that in the United States there has been consistent focus on allegations that Russian socmed experts have somehow influenced the voting public in a way that helped elect Donald Trump in an upset victory over erstwhile “shoo-in” Hillary Clinton.
The investigation in the US somehow opened a can of worms — or was it Pandora’s Box? — leading to the discovery of a similar effort to influence the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, the influence of a company called Cambridge Analytica, and, most recently, apparent links of an arm of this operation into efforts to influence the Philippine elections in 2016.
Australia’s mining professionals blame the sector’s association with the fossil fuels industry for contributing to negative public perceptions more than their counterparts in India, South Africa or North America.
According to the Innovation: State of Play report, released on Tuesday by consulting firm VCI, 16 per cent of the Australian mining professionals surveyed ranked mining’s association with the “fossil fuels industry” as the reason the industry was perceived negatively in society.
It was the highest result for the link to fossil fuels in any region and ranked second among issues facing the Australian mining industry behind “environmental impact”, which scored highest in every region. VCI surveyed more than 800 global mining professionals, about 70 per cent of which work at an executive level, from 321 companies.
David Suzuki is at it again slandering and smearing Canadian industry, this time, Canada’s mining companies.
It was about one year ago that Suzuki likened the Canadian oil and gas industry to plantation slavery which, following his analogy, would make the thousands of hard working Canadian men and women, concerned about the future prospects of their careers, like slave owners.
What a bizarre, out of touch thing to say. And today we heard more of the same in a Rabble.ca piece where Suzuki calls the Canadian mining industry and our mining companies “disgusting”.
