Two of the industry’s biggest players are joining forces to help accelerate the future of safer and more sustainable tailings management, with BHP and Rio Tinto releasing new research aimed at improving large-scale filtered tailings technology across the mining sector.
“Reimagining tailings management will require the industry to explore new ideas, using the new information from emerging research and development,” BHP principal innovation tailings Tony Tran said.
The work is being driven through the Tailings Management Consortium (TCM), a partnership established by the two mining majors in 2022 to improve tailings dewatering and increase water recovery from mine waste streams.
“Successful innovation requires an agile approach that adjusts to new information,” Rio Tinto principal advisor research and development copper Kaci Jenkins said.
As part of the collaboration, the consortium has released a new whitepaper, ‘Unlocking Large Tonnage Filtered Tailings Stacks: A Geotechnical Perspective’, outlining new approaches that could help scale filtered tailings systems for large mining operations.
Filtered tailings technology is already well established in smaller-scale operations, but the consortium believes further innovation could unlock broader adoption across large tonnage mines, helping reduce water use, lower environmental footprints and improve long-term tailings management outcomes.
The whitepaper highlights opportunities to optimise compaction and stacking techniques, while also identifying ways upstream processing and material handling could be refined to improve performance at scale.
“The consortium aims to foster industry debate and collaboration, ultimately contributing to safer and more sustainable filtered tailings management practices,” Jenkins said.
TCM’s work was designed to encourage broader industry participation and bring together expertise from across mining, engineering and research.
“This clear outline of what is needed to make progress invites contributions from a range of industry experts, as this is truly a multi-disciplinary problem,” Tran said.
As the industry continues searching for safer and more sustainable ways to manage mine waste, the partnership between BHP and Rio Tinto highlights the growing focus on collaboration, innovation and shared technical expertise to help shape the next generation of tailings management.
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