Mining Certification Evaluation Project: Developing Principles and Criteria for Mine Site Performance

摘要

Providing credible information to the community on a range of issues - climate change, water use, human rights, social justice, corporate power - can only increase in importance. People, whether as consumers, purchasers, investors, or community groups, will be interested in the provenance of a huge range of materials that we use in our societies and will want to see best practice implemented in industrial activities. In the mining industry, certification could offer the potential to credibly differentiate claims of good social and environmental performance at mine sites. For companies that rightly value how their performance is both perceived and measured, but also for stakeholders who seek an objective third-party assessment of such performance, certification is a valuable tool. New benchmarks of best practice should emerge by clearly articulating performance criteria and this could have significant implications for the way mining is carried out.