7 February
2024
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Minas-Rio and Barro Alto mines
achieve IRMA 75 on responsible mining standard
|
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Anglo American announces that its
Minas-Rio iron ore and Barro Alto nickel mines in Brazil have been
assessed against the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance's
(IRMA) comprehensive mining standard, achieving the IRMA 75 level
of performance, reflecting Anglo American's integrated approach to
sustainability and its commitment to transparency in striving for
the highest levels of responsible metals production.
Minas-Rio and Barro Alto are the
first iron ore and nickel-producing mines in the world to complete
an IRMA audit. This follows the achievement of our Unki platinum
mine in Zimbabwe, the first in the world to publicly commit to be
independently audited against the IRMA Standard for Responsible
Mining and which also achieved IRMA 75 in 2021.
Ruben Fernandes, Anglo American's Regional Director -
Americas, said: "We believe our
participation in IRMA helps promote transparency
and best practice in sustainability, while adding value to our
customers by helping them to meet increasing expectations for
responsibly sourced mined materials in an efficient and credible
way. Through our digital traceability platform Valutrax™,
which launched last year, we are also making it easier for
customers to have visibility over products with third-party
assurance such as IRMA, empowering the transparency and provenance
of their purchasing decisions. We are continuing to make great
progress towards assuring all our operations against a recognised
responsible mining standard by 2025, as we committed to in our
Sustainable Mining Plan."
Aimee Boulanger, Executive Director of
IRMA, said: "We applaud Anglo
American for volunteering the first iron ore and nickel mines for
an audit against the IRMA Standard for Responsible Mining, and for
its larger commitment to put all their metal mining operations to
IRMA audit. That commitment, along with their IRMA Board
membership, exemplifies Anglo American's ongoing leadership in the
practical application of responsible mining principles."
Ana
Sanches, CEO of Anglo American in Brazil, commented: "The IRMA assurance process has provided us with
a valuable opportunity to measure our performance at Minas-Rio and
Barro Alto against international best sustainability practices and
identify next steps for improvement. The result is informed by
evidence from a diverse range of stakeholders including employees,
governments, NGOs, customers and communities alike. We are
immensely proud of the work the teams have been doing at Minas-Rio
and Barro Alto on responsible mining, and we look forward to
continue leading the way for our other mining operations across
Anglo American."
The IRMA scoring system recognises
four levels of performance: IRMA Transparency, in which a mine is
third-party-assessed and publicly shares its scores; IRMA 50 or 75,
signifying that a mine meets a core set of critical requirements
together with at least 50% or 75% of the requirements in each of
the four sections of the Standard for Responsible Mining and IRMA
100, which signifies the mine meets all of the Standard's
requirements.
Other Anglo American operations that
have been independently audited include the Mototolo, Amandelbult
and Mogalakwena PGMs operations in South Africa; and the Kolomela
and Sishen iron ore operations, also in South Africa. The outcomes
of those audit reports are pending.
IRMA's Standard for Responsible
Mining has been developed over a decade through a public
consultation process with more than 100 different individuals and
organisations, including mining companies, customers and the
ultimate downstream users of mined products, NGOs, labour unions,
and communities, and is considered to be one of the most rigorous
certification processes. The link to the Minas-Rio and Barro
Alto reports can be found on IRMA's website at:
https://responsiblemining.net/.
For further information, please
contact:
Notes to editors:
Anglo American is a leading global
mining company and our products are the essential ingredients in
almost every aspect of modern life. Our portfolio of world-class
competitive operations, with a broad range of future development
options, provides many of the future-enabling metals and minerals
for a cleaner, greener, more sustainable world and that meet the
fast growing every day demands of billions of consumers. With our
people at the heart of our business, we use innovative practices
and the latest technologies to discover new resources and to mine,
process, move and market our products to our customers - safely and
sustainably.
As a responsible producer of copper,
nickel, platinum group metals, diamonds (through De Beers), and
premium quality iron ore and steelmaking coal - with crop nutrients
in development - we are committed to being carbon neutral across
our operations by 2040. More broadly, our Sustainable Mining Plan
commits us to a series of stretching goals to ensure we work
towards a healthy environment, creating thriving communities and
building trust as a corporate leader. We work together with our
business partners and diverse stakeholders to unlock enduring value
from precious natural resources for the benefit of the communities
and countries in which we operate, for society as a whole, and for
our shareholders. Anglo American is re-imagining mining to improve
people's lives.
www.angloamerican.com
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