One of our core values is to protect the environment by minimizing the impact of our operations. We’re committed to the Towards Sustainable Mining (TSM) guiding principles, which include finding ways to minimize the impact of our operations on the environment through all stages of development.

There’s no question that mining activities affect air, water, soil and ecosystems. Being a good steward of the environment means mitigating, as much as possible, our impact on the environment and taking appropriate steps to rehabilitate affected areas when our work there is done.

Our environmental performance in 2008 was not up to our expectations. There was a higher number of incidents across the company that were reportable to environmental agencies according to regulatory requirements and our internal standards. Most of the incidents involved exceeding permit conditions for water discharge, mainly for suspended solids and pH. Several of these were reported at Pyhäsalmi, which has new compliance conditions and where new equipment has been installed to better monitor conditions. Heavy spring rains in northern Quebec affected the environmental performance of our Troilus operation. In our judgment, the environmental impact of these incidents was minor.

Significant environment-related matters were the dewatering and reinjection system (DRS) issues at Las Cruces. Although the DRS system was operating as designed and there were no impacts to the regional aquifer which is intersected by the Las Cruces open pit, we took the concerns of the regulator seriously and developed a Global Plan, which consists of three primary additional measures to protect the aquifer:

1. Purification of reinjected water to meet Spanish human health-based drinking water quality standards
2. Optimization of the DRS
3. Restructuring of Las Cruces’ water management responsibilities.

These additional protection measures and the significant cost implications demonstrate our commitment to environmental protection. We made substantial progress at Mina de Cobre Panamá by largely completing the baseline studies. We intend to submit our completed EsIA to support our environmental and social impact assessment to Panamanian regulatory authorities by the end of 2009.

We employ people at each operation who are trained and specialize in environmental protection.

Download the PDF of our environmental performance in 2008.