Starke Linda (ed.) Planning for Integrated Mine Closure: Toolkit

United Kingdom, London: International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM), 2008. — 86 p. — ISBN: 978-0-9553591-8-7.Closure planning is a complex process. In many ways it is as complex as the project feasibility process that culminates in a constructed operation. The planning horizon is measured in decades, not months or years. Planners must deal with social, economic and environmental parameters that over a generation are bound to change.
In the past, closure planning has been the responsibility of operation management and focused on environmental aspects, with community involvement often limited to cursory consultation processes. Increasingly today, however, management looks to community ownership of the post closure goals as the well of energy that will permit closure initiatives to prosper when the mining company is no longer involved. To achieve this, community engagement is needed when scoping the challenge, conceptualizing the solution, implementing the design and verifying the outcomes. In addition to increasing the level of credibility, this establishes partnerships to drive success and, in doing so, creates a forum for transparency.
Fundamental to this approach is the need to consider closure as a core part of our business. The integration of closure considerations into an operation’s planning and engineering processes is an important mechanism for a mine to create lasting value. This Integrated Mine Closure Planning Toolkit has been developed to help site practitioners and their support groups make sound decisions based on a consideration of closure aspects in a holistic manner. The risks and opportunities that define the paths to closure are many and varied, and a disciplined, knowledgeable approach to closure planning is required to successfully negotiate these paths. It is our hope that this document provides practical guidance to
negotiating them.Foreword
Executive summaryParticipants in effective closure planning
Framework of a conceptual closure plan
Framework of a detailed closure plan
Decommissioning and post-closure planning
Challenges and conclusions
Toolkit