Tailings Management - Sustainability - Teck Resources

Teck operates and maintains our tailings facilities to meet global best practices for safety including the Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management and other industry leading tailings governance protocols and guidelines established by the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM) and the Mining Association of Canada (MAC). These leading protocols are supported by applicable best practice technical and tailings management guidance from sources such as the Canadian Dam Association and the International Commission on Large Dams, which also inform Teck’s governance program. 

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Six Levels of Protection
 

1. Surveillance Technology: Sites employ surveillance systems such as piezometers, inclinometers, pressure gauges, drones, satellite-based remote sensing and other technologies to monitor tailings embankments, abutments, natural slopes and water levels.

4. Detailed Third-Party Reviews: Comprehensive third-party safety reviews are conducted by qualified independent tailings experts as frequently as every three years, based upon the potential consequence for each facility.

5. Internal Governance Reviews: Teck’s Tailings Working Group conducts internal management reviews of our active and closed tailings facilities as well as our major tailings projects on a regular basis.

6. Independent Tailings Review Boards: All of our facilities, active or inactive (Legacy) have Tailings Review Boards made up of independent experts who meet regularly, at least annually, to conduct a third-party review of design, operation, surveillance and maintenance. These Boards also provide input into our internal governance and the quality of work done by our third- party engineers-of-record.

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Emergency Preparedness

All Teck tailings facilities have a detailed Operations, Maintenance and Surveillance manual. All tailings facilities with credible failure scenarios and/or any appreciable potential consequence have a site-specific Mine Emergency Response Plan that includes specific preparedness and response plans for the tailings facility, which are regularly reviewed and updated. We also review Emergency Response Plans with our local communities and stakeholders and undertake community meetings and emergency drills to work through these plans and discuss our approach to tailings management.

For all facilities with a credible flow failure scenario (tailings that could credibly leave the impoundment in an uncontrolled and destructive manner), a breach and inundation evaluation is conducted to identify potentially impacted communities and waterbodies in the extremely unlikely event of a tailings incident, in order to evaluate design or mitigation strategies and to assist with emergency planning and response. Teck’s programs exist to reduce the likelihood of such catastrophic events.

Potential consequence is evaluated on the basis of the potential environmental, safety and economic effects of a failure. This ranking does not reflect likelihood of failure, but rather provides a tool to assist with facility design and emergency planning.

Transparency on Tailings

Teck is committed to being open and transparent with communities and other stakeholders regarding the construction and management of our tailings facilities. One of the most important pieces of information for each tailings facility is the Annual Facility Performance Report (AFPR). Formerly termed a Dam Safety Inspection (DSI), an AFPR is conducted annually for each tailings facility by the independent third-party Engineer of Record. The AFPR is a detailed examination of the facility and related infrastructure with the purpose of identifying any conditions or changes that might impact the safety and reliability of the structure and to make recommendations where any issues warranting attention are noted. Teck tracks the recommendations and works with the Engineer of Record to address each item in a timely manner. Follow this link for the AFPRs for Teck’s tailings facilities by site.

In response to a May request from the Investor Mining & Tailings Safety Initiative, chaired by the Church of England and Swedish Council on Ethics for the AP Funds, Teck provided specific details and information regarding our tailings facilities and our approach to tailings management.This included a detailed list of tailings facilities and details about each. This list was updated in April .

Download Teck's updated Church of England and Swedish Council on Ethics Disclosure list of tailings facilities. 
 

Focused on Continual Improvement

While we are confident in the safety and security of our tailings facilities, we are committed to continually reviewing our facilities and procedures to maintain the highest standard of safety at our operations. Following the Mt Polley Mine tailings failure in British Columbia and the Samarco and Feijão (Brumadinho) failures in Brazil, we initiated special reviews of our tailings facilities and procedures with specific attention to overall governance and any facilities that may have brittle failure potential (e.g. flow liquefaction). These reviews included external experts who were independent to any aspect of the design or operation of any of our facilities.  The reviews confirmed Teck’s programs to be industry-leading and comprehensive without any concerns of a failure occurring as a result. However, these reviews also identified areas for continual improvement which we have, in turn, embedded into our overall governance program.

In addition to Global Tailings Standard (GISTM), we work in partnership with numerous local, national and international organizations to support improvements in tailings and mine waste management across our industry, including:

• International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM): A global industry association that represents leading international mining and metals companies. In , ICMM released its Tailings Good Practice Guide which built upon the Tailings Governance Framework and Position Statement. ICMM also released a Conformance Protocol in to provide member companies an implementation pathway for the Global Standard noted above (GISTM).  

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• Mining Association of Canada (MAC): A national association that promotes the development of Canada’s mining and mineral processing industry. Through MAC, we implement the Towards Sustainable Mining (TSM) program, which aids in improving industry performance. MAC’s Tailings Management Guideline has been an industry-leading document for more than 20 years and, along with the ICMM Good Practice Guide, has informed Teck’s own best practice for governance and procedures.

• Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of British Columbia: As a member company, Teck was a reviewer for the guideline for the requirements of foundation investigations for dams that was issued in .

• Australian Research Council: In , Teck became part of an applied research program, along with four universities in Australia and several other mining companies, focused on finding more effective tools for predicting and avoiding tailings facility failures.

• Canadian Dam Association: As a member of the Association, Teck’s senior technical leaders have provided input to industry guidance on best practices.

Mining, or the process of extracting or separating valuable minerals from sources of raw material, is one of the oldest industries in the world. A wide variety of different materials are obtained through mining, including a multitude of metals, gemstones, natural gas, and coal. These valuable minerals are processed and extracted in many different ways, but the common denominator is that as these minerals are processed, vast amounts of unused byproduct or waste collects at the site, often called mine tailings. These tailings will need to be continually displaced as to not disrupt the mining operations production rate.

What are Mine Tailings?

Mine tailings are the finely ground rock and mineral waste products from mineral processing operations. Naturally, not everything the mines produce will be immediately usable, as they must first be processed and refined which is what creates the tailings material. Therefore the tailings are often further crushed, slurried, and pumped away from the mining site where they are eventually collected into dry pools or plastic-lined ponds called tailing ponds. These ponds act as a holding area for the tailings and are often designed to include poly or plastic liners to protect the chemicals from leaching into the groundwater.

However, as tailings ponds begin to fill to capacity, the mines will need to figure out how to displace the tailings to make more room for production and not interrupt the operation. This is often a challenging process but is often accomplished with sensitive dredging equipment designed for dredging with a liner present. This is needed to ensure the process goes smoothly without harming the liner material.

Since mineral extraction can involve many things, including chemicals, the tailings are often low or high in pH and very viscous. These compounded issues create havoc on conventional pumps, causing them to have a lot of trouble moving the material without constant maintenance problems. Finally, the tailings often still hold high value, depending on the resource. This allows the tailings to be extracted again using a hydraulic dredging system and pumped to a separation plant for an additional round of extraction. This is seen in many gold and iron ore plants that are keen to extract as much of the value material as possible.

Methods of Transporting Tailings

The methods of displacing or transporting mine tailings generally fall into two categories. The first method involves wetting the tailings into a slurry mixture that can be pumped using a slurry pump or gravity to move it down a pipeline system into a tailings pond. Pumping using centrifugal style slurry pumps are still the most common type of pumping system used in tailings slurry transportation. Often, when a tailings trade-off study is performed for a proposed storage facility, the limits of centrifugal pumping are almost always more cost-effective than paste transportation (particularly for high tonnage operations). However, in cases where there are limited land and water availability, the paste is the only viable option.

Paste tailings can be pumped by centrifugal pumps, up to a limit. Beyond the limits of centrifugal pumps, positive displacement pumps are then required for paste tailings. This is typically done using a piston diaphragm or hydraulic piston pumps. Peristaltic pumps are also used for smaller operations.

The other method involves the use of conveyor belts to continuously move debris away from the mining site and into a designated area for stacking and processing. This is accomplished by creating filtered tailings, or wet cake tailings. Wet cake tailings are tailings with around 18% moisture content, allowing them to be stacked like cakes, and transported on conveyor belts. This method is generally preferred when water conservation is a priority, which is becoming increasingly more common in the mining industry. In recent years, there has been much improvement in the field of dewatering mine tailings using pressure and vacuum filtration methods. Wet cake transportation adheres to two methods: plow and radial stacker.

The Plough method is where a movable plow is employed to direct the wet cake tailings from the main conveyor onto a delivery conveyor or discharged to a storage allocate.

The Radial stacker method is meant for low tonnage operations, where the use of a truck and shovel is required. The radial stacker can rotate, up to around 120 degrees, which feeds to separate conveyors.

Things to Consider

Mine tailings storage management is an increasing challenge to maintain. Customers need to consider the increasing volume of tailings and the increasing environmental regulations associated with tailings management. An increasing amount of tailings is associated with the increased use of water to transport these tailings, which leads to the aforementioned waters costs associated with tailings.

The specifications of the dredge pump used for mine tailings are very dependent on the composition of what is being transported, as well as the distance at which the operator wants it to be transported. Therefore, most slurry pump transport systems have to operate with variation to support different viscosity and density material. These factors are used to calculate the specific input and output pressures that will allow the tailings to travel within the pipe. Specific examples would be if the output pressure of the dredge pipe is too high, the pipe will be blown out. If the output pressure is too low, the material will settle in the pipeline and get clogged, causing downtime.

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