RICHARD THOMPSON, Johannesburg | Wednesday
THE South African gold mining industry announced on Wednesday a new best practice guideline for managing cyanide, drawn up in consultation with government, labour, non-governmental organisations and cyanide suppliers.
Addressing a press conference in Johannesburg, Bernard Swanepoel –chairman of the gold producers committee of the Chamber of Mines — said the guideline was ”a result of public concerns over accidents involving cyanide in other countries.
The banning of cyanide in the Czech Republic, Turkey and Montana… showed that public fears of cyanide had to be taken seriously.”
After those accidents the United Nations Environment Programme began to draw up an international code of practice for cyanide management, which is not yet complete.
The Chamber’s comprehensive, 158-page guideline was ”aligned” with the UN process.
In the early mining days, gold was found either as nuggets, which were recovered from rivers by panning, or by mining rich veins of gold found in quartz ore.
Usually, old mines and sites are depleted and mining companies now have to recover the gold and other precious metals from fine grains found in solid rock.
The rock containing the gold is ground up, usually in large rotary mills, to create particles as fine as dust. That creates a slurry. The slurry is treated with a cyanide solution in large tanks and over a number of hours. This creates a gold cyanide solution or a gold-silver-cyanide solution and the by-product, sometimes called residue pulp. Zinc dust is then added to the solution to precipitate out the gold, silver and copper dissolved in the cyanide solution. The precipitate is treated with sulphuric acid to remove the zinc and copper. The material is then washed, and the gold and silver are melted into an alloy called dore.
South Africa’s new guidelines cover all aspects of cyanide management, including risk assessment, supply, distribution and storage, emergency and environmental management and rehabilitation.
Johan Gloy, guideline manager for the Chamber of Mines, said banning cyanide ”has the potential to plunge the gold mining industry back into economic crisis.”
Gloy said existing practices of managing cyanide were reviewed when drawing up the guideline.
There were 45 operating gold mines in the country at present, of which 29 were Chamber members. The non-Chamber mines were small operators producing about 9,6 tons of the approximately 429 tons of gold mined in South Africa annually, but used a large proportion of the cyanide used in the industry.
”A cyanide incident at a small mine would reflect badly on the whole industry,” Gloy said.
National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) president Senzeni Zokwana said the process had been criticised for reacting to the possible banning of cyanide rather than the safety of workers and the environment.
But NUM’s view was the same as other stakeholders: the safety of workers, the public and the environment was paramount, and the industry should take steps before being put under pressure.
The guideline is voluntary, and Zokwana said NUM’s view was that better compliance would be achieved by a mandatory code.
He praised the committee that drew up the guideline, and said the next stage would be to apply it.
Gloy said while the guideline was voluntary, it was expected to become mandatory under the Mines Health and Safety Act.
Asked for statistics of cyanide deaths or injuries, Gloy said he had none available, but the committee had established that the present guideline would have prevented previous accidents if it had been in force earlier.
There had not been many cyanide deaths in South Africa recently, Gloy said.
The Mine Health and Safety Act required mine managers to display ”due diligence”. If an accident happened, a manager could show that he had been duly diligent by applying the guideline. – Sapa