JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – The South African mining industry needs to start doing the extraordinary to elevate the industry’s thinking on sustainability as it moves into the future, says AngloGold Ashanti’s newly appointed social and sustainable development executive VP David Noko.

“We cannot continue to resource our mines using a 100-year-old culture,” says Noko, the former De Beers South Africa MD, who is in the process of defining a sustainability strategy and enabling opportunities for cross-learning across the company’s global operations.

He believes that studies should be initiated into the economic viability of creating mines with education bolt-ons, along the lines of academic hospitals, and flying migrant mineworkers home during their off periods.

Noko sees as the industry’s biggest downfall its long history of employing people with minimal education, which has resulted in low productivity being built into the system, and would like to explore the potential of “academic mines”.

He points to the creation of the Lesedi Centre for Human Capital Development in Kimberley, which was created during his period with De Beers.

He finds that investors are increasingly asking social and sustainability questions ahead of investment questions because they know that these issues can bring mining to a halt if not prioritised properly.

He tells Mining Weekly Online that mining companies in other developing countries are making a point of recruiting people with higher levels of basic education and is impressed by Brazilian methods of training underground miners on surface.

When new mines are designed, he believes that every effort should be made to accommodate mineworkers in existing home towns and then to link these to the mine by rapid transport systems like rail.

He notes that mineworkers in Argentina are flown thousands of kilometres back to Buenos Aires at ten-day and 15-day intervals.

“We really should be looking into the feasibility of mass transportation facilities, moving mineworkers home to spend their weekends with their families,” he adds.

This would simultaneously up the tempo of economic activity of the labour-sourcing areas.

Under his leadership, AngloGold Ashanti will continue to target total business sustainability, involving the coexistence of business and society and embracing the interests of shareholders, communities, employees, suppliers, environment and human rights.

As a global company, AngloGold Ashanti is aligned with global initiatives including those of the International Council on Mining and Metals.

“We’ve been doing the economic assessments and country risk assessments and now we need to do more on the social opportunity assessments of the countries, fundamental to which are environmental issues.

“We’ve got to make sure that the environment is not compromised, but is improved by our presence. We determine the parameters to know how the area was prior to our entry so we can make reasonable promises on what it will look like when we leave the area,” Noko explains to Mining Weekly Online.