Economic and Societal issues in mining and recycling (GEOL 1045)

Seminars 21/10/2022

Student name: Vanessa Aquino Chaves

Registration number: S220843

Emerald Cohort 9
Liège, Belgique
Guest speaker: Eric Poot

Eric has worked in many countries and different cultural environments during his
career. He wanted to give an approach to the interference of cultural and political contexts in
mining operations in poor countries.

He began his career in an underground mine in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of
Congo. He was there between 1989 and 1992. When he started, it was only 30 years after
independence, and the country was still facing many troubles. At the time, the president was a
dictator and they were in an economic crisis. Foreign investors stop putting a lot of money into
them but never completely abandon them.

The SOMINKI company, resulting from the merger of many former colonial mining
companies, had the State as a free bearing minority shareholder. They operated many gold
mines in the eastern provinces, including Kamituga, the mine that Eric worked.

Kamituga began its operation in the late 1950s, when the country was still under
colonial rule. They faced a big problem in 1991 with illegal diggers associated with the military
supposed to protect the mine. Moreover, part of the illegal production was distributed among
them, causing serious losses to the company.

Furthermore, in the last months of 1991, Mobutu's army started to loot the big cities,
and they had to negotiate with them not to loot Kamituga, but the price was to pay 6 months
of military arrears. Later, from 1996 to 2001, three wars broke out and the gold mine area
changed hands many times, so the mine area was flooded and there are big problems like
violations of human rights, the supply of drinking water and a system of health care and
education.

In addition, the SOMINKI company had to invest a lot of money in services such as the
construction and maintenance of roads and bridges, the production and distribution of
electricity and water, the construction of hospitals and schools, services normally organized for
the State. Eric said people were getting used to the situation and becoming addicted to this
"paternalistic model", which is the consequence of a failing government.

The second experience was in Baja California Sur, Mexico, in another underground
gold mine, but this time as a manager. He was there between 1992 and 2001. The area was
mostly dry and a hot desert.

La Testera was created in the 1990s, in a favorable economic and political environment
in Mexico, mainly due to the establishment of NAFTA and the revision of the mining code,
reopening mining to foreign visitors. But they were not planning a drop of 25% in the gold
price after the investment decision. They spent months struggling against the market and then
decided to put the operation was put in care and maintenance until the market recovers.

Aside from all the myths about lazy Mexicans, Eric argued that they are good workers,
proud of their country, always happy and stalk their elders. Also, while he was there, they
could arrange better working and transportation conditions, such as putting showers at the
sites, arranging bus transportation, offering good salaries, etc.

One of the problems he faced while working there was discovering an airstrip used for
drug smuggling. They traveled to the property to talk with them and negotiate peace between
the mining operation and them, to ensure no interference between any parties.
 Eric's third experience was in Congo between 2001 and 2004, with a project called the
“Big Hill”, in a company called STL. The “Big Hill” was a giant slag pile accumulated since the
1930s, where the last third of the tonnage was rich in cobalt, copper, zinc and some
germanium.

The greatest potential was to process cobalt, with an estimated mining potential of
approximately 4.5 Mt at a grade of 2.2%. The solution was to invest in an electric furnace and
this technology was developed by Outokumpu in Finland.

The project was the first major industrial investment in Congo in decades after the
wars. This therefore represented a comeback for business in the Congo. It was so important
that in one of their bills at the time was a drawing of the "Big Hill".

Then he had his fourth professional experience in the Central African Republic
(Bakouma) between 2007 and 2008. He was invited to be a project manager for a large open-
pit uranium project.

In the past, the project was considered for different companies, but due to many
problems such as remoteness, size of the resource, lack of transport infrastructure. But in 2005
a company called Uramin took over the operation, they reassessed the reserves and found a
larger reserve than before. Additionally, they had a vision for the future, as there was a global
call to reduce carbon emissions.

The company has had a potential positive impact like promoting some agricultural
improvements, planning the construction of a hydroelectric facility, creating jobs for people,
and tax and financial revenue for the country.

But after some difficulties with the government, after the Fukushima nuclear disaster
and other circumstances, the company abandoned the project. Since then, the CAR has
suffered social unrest, hostilities between communities, foreign interference and the country
faces deep difficulties, so that mining projects are canceled and postponed to an
unforeseeable future.

The fifth experience took place in Sudan (Red Sea State), from 2008 to 2009. He was
the general manager of a French-Sudanese joint venture with large open-pit gold mines, in the
middle of nowhere.

Production in 2008 was approximately 4 tons of gold per year. The operations took
place in a dry and very hot desert. They brought social support to the villages so that they had
drinking water, a primary school and sanitary facilities. In addition, the company has
contributed to preserving cultural patronage, for example by excavating ruins dating from the
Pharaonic era (Mereo Empire).

In 2008, however, they had to deal with drought and tribal tensions. They got the
support of highly respected elders (religious aspects) to talk with the tribes and have a neutral
stance on mining. And that's when they came up with the idea of creating a permanent water
reservoir, using part of one of their depleted open-pit mine.

To finish the experiences, in 2011 and 2012 he worked again in Congo (Katanga), but
this time in an open pit mine of copper and cobalt. Besides extreme poverty and political
instability, a new society and economic development was taking shape.
 To conclude, it is important to understand the political and cultural contexts when you
start working in a company. It is important to be aware that basic requests for help may occur
and important to balance the interests of the company with all stakeholders.

Guest speaker: Benedicte Robertz

Benedicte is senior manager Life Cycle Analysis and Product Sustainability at Umicore.
She wanted to give a better idea of what sustainability is for Umicore and also of the roles and
responsibilities of her team.

She started asking what sustainability is for the class and after listening to all the
answers she presented a slide showing that there are many views on sustainability it depends
on many perspectives as scientists, investors, regulators, customers. She would therefore like
to show what it is for Umicore.

First, she introduced Umicore. The company develops sustainable solutions to respond
to global megatrends, their mission is "Materials for a Better Life" and their business model is
to use the application know-how to transform metals into material solutions, then, with
recycling expertise, to put back the materials in the wheel to close the loop.

The mobility transformation in radically accelerating, so they’re working on many

levels to achieve clean mobility. They develop automotive catalysts to clean the exhaust gases
from internal combustion engines. In this field they are one of the biggest three players on the
market. They are also developing the rechargeable battery materials that power hybrid, plug-in
hybrid and full electric vehicles.

At the same time, the company is investing in recycling to close the materials loop.
They can recover about 20 precious and non-ferrous metals. This allows them to use metals
produced from recycled sources, such as production scrap, residues from customers, other
industries and our own operations, as well as post-consumer materials.

They are consistently investing in research to meet the growing demand for clean
mobility materials and for quality recycling of precious and other valuable metals. Today they
have 15 R&D centers and in 2020 they invested about 200 million euros on R&D.

Umicore RISE program is their 2030 strategy to become the leading circular materials
technology company. The R means being a reliable transformation partner, they want to guide
costumers in their transformation journey towards a sustainable and circular company. The I
stand for Innovation and Technology Leader. Umicore is already the leader, but their future
success relies on maintaining their technological advantage and value creation. The S means
Sustainability champion, means maximizing our positive impact on society at large and
delivering sustainable solutions to our customers. And to finish the E is excellence in execution.

The “Let’s go for Zero strategy” is another strategy launched in June 2021, which aims
to have zero Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions by 2035; zero harm (safety, wellbeing,
sustainable supply) and zero inequality (gender parity, diversity and pay equality).

The Zero GHG emissions is divided in 3 scopes. The scope 1 is the direct emissions of
fusil fuels on site. The scope 2 is energy purchase (indirect) and the scope 3 is all the other
indirect forms of emission, considering from the mine to downstream activities. Their ambition
is reach net-zero scope 1 and 2 GHG emissions by 2035.
 To finish she presented some of their KPIs and how they put in numbers and evaluate
and follow-up each one of these goals. Also, she talked about the work in Health and Safety
regarding sustainability management and all their challenges as certification schemes, increase
regulatory pressure, demand for transparency, business confidentially, etc.

Guest speaker: Pierre François Bareel

François works in the COMET group as a CEO. Is a family-owned industrial group that
have operations in Brussels, Charleroi and Mons in Belgium. They were before steel makers
and now they are specializing in trading ferrous and non-ferrous metals and the derivatives
thereof.

They had developed new technologies and an industrial capacity that make them a
leading company in Europe in terms of materials recycling. They can achieve a recycling
percentage of end-of life vehicles (ELV) exceeding 98%.

Their process basically can be divided in 5 steps: receiving scrapes (ferrous, non-
ferrous, ELV, waste electrical and electronic equipment, tires, plastic), depolluting and
dismantling (manual process), then going through the shredder (main equipment, capacity of
300 vehicles per hour or 300 tons per hour), after that there is a separation process (today is
manually but they are working with the university of Liege to implement a pilot plant with
robots to help on this activity – Multipick project) and to finish the transportation.

They also have a R&D center and several universities partnership, they invest about 10
million a year in research. To process plastic coming from mostly mineral and food industry,
they have a plant called Plantiwin, which has the capacity to process 80 thousand tons of
plastic per year.

Some of their numbers: they process about 1,2 million tons of materials per year and
usually 70% of the input is iron. The revenues are about 350 million of euros. And they have
380 employees. About transportation, they have about 250 transports a day, between roads,
fluvial and rail.