Glencore’s (LSE: GLEN) Canadian coal unit, Elk Valley Resources, and building materials company Amrize (NYSE: AMRZ) led the honours at the 48th British Columbia mine reclamation awards this week.
Elk Valley won the Jake McDonald Annual Reclamation Award for its “progressive” reclamation of the Swift project at the Fording River operations in the province’s southeast.
Amrize, formerly known as Lafarge, scooped the Sand & Gravel Award for its achievement of reclamation across 46 hectares through its unit Abbotsford Gravel Sales.
Elk Valley’s Jacqueline Dube and DJ Formanski won the Tony Milligan Book Award for an academic paper on reclamation design.
Rabeya Shikdar Orpa and Zhaohui (Sunny) Han, students at Thompson Rivers University Master of Science program, won scholarships.
The awards ceremony on Wednesday was part of the annual Mine Reclamation Symposium in Penticton. The symposium spanned several days and included workshops, mine tours and technical presentations. The ceremony recognized the efforts B.C. mining companies are undertaking in environmental protection and mine site reclamation. More than 270 people attended this year’s symposium.
Fording River
Glencore is proposing the Fording River Extension project, a “critical economic engine” for southeast B.C., to lengthen its lifespan by about 35 years. Reclamation activities that started in 2020 used a bottom-up lift construction method for landform development. The project had set a goal to produce 170 million tonnes of steelmaking coal over 25 years.
Amrize’ s project demonstrates how the aggregate industry can work collaboratively with agricultural stakeholders to responsibly access essential resources while supporting land stewardship and food production goals, the awards group said.
The company’s team proposed a collaborative solution with neighbouring landowners and the B.C. Agricultural Land Commission to restore 12 ha (30 acres) of land as well as mining and restoring 34 ha 85 acres of land.
The paper by Elk Valley’s Dube and Formanski, ‘An operational approach to geomorphic design in mine reclamation : A case study from Teck Coal Line Creek Operations’, was presented at last year’s symposium. The award was created to recognize the contributions Tony Milligan made to mine reclamation. He served as a mine reclamation inspector for the provincial government and as the reclamation manager at the Elkview mine.
Awards history
The British Columbia Technical and Research Committee on Reclamation Technical and Research Committee on Reclamation presented the awards in front of an audience of biologists, engineers, mine workers and representatives, partners and members of First Nations communities, and students.
Since 1969, mining companies are required by law to reclaim mine site lands when mine life ends. B.C. was one of the first jurisdictions in Canada to implement mine reclamation legislation, and the first to extend this policy to exploration sites, the Mining Association of B.C. said in a news release.
Since then, the provincial government under the Ministry of Mining and Critical Minerals has required companies to post a reclamation security bond before mineral exploration and mining work begins at any site.
Next year’s Mine Reclamation Symposium is to be held in Fort St. John from Sept. 21 to 25.
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