Our industry involvement includes the support of three key initiatives:
Mining Association of Canada
We’re an active member of the Mining Association of Canada (MAC), a national industry organization that seeks to promote the growth and development of Canada's mining and mineral-processing industry, for the benefit of all Canadians.
The association promotes the interests of the industry nationally and internationally, working with governments on policies affecting minerals and with provincial and other industry groups in Canada and other countries. Our Chairman and CEO, Richard Ross, is the past chairman of MAC.
Towards Sustainable Mining
Towards Sustainable Mining (TSM) is an initiative of MAC and its member companies to improve the reputation of the Canadian mining industry through improved operational performance, particularly in the social and environmental aspects of our business.
Inmet plays a leadership role in the TSM initiative by:
- measuring and reporting results for our domestic and international operations and our closed properties
- promoting TSM with our peers and the investment community.
Our Vice-President, Safety, Environmental and Community Affairs, Craig Ford, is also a MAC Board Member and an active member of the TSM Governance Team, an oversight committee of industry senior executives.
Our TSM performance
As we have in the past, we again reported our facility-by-facility performance against the TSM indicators for our operations worldwide, including for our 18 percent share in Ok Tedi Mining Limited in Papua New Guinea. We have also reported the TSM performance of each of our closed properties. We have done this to demonstrate that we apply a consistent standard to all operations, regardless of their location or operating status. We believe that detailed, facility-by-facility assessments help to improve performance.
In 2007 we continued to incorporate TSM targets into the safety, environmental and community affairs targets at our operations, and we reported on the progress we made. Although we did not meet all the targets, we did continue to improve our systems, hence our TSM assessments.
2007 Highlights
We continued to make progress this year in managing risks in three of the four TSM performance areas – tailings management, community dialogue (external outreach), crisis and emergency management, and energy and greenhouse gas management. Our 2007 results were determined through self-assessment.
Tailings management
Pyhäsalmi made substantial progress in completing its tailings OMS Manual and have targeted an April, 2008 completion date.
Community dialogue (external outreach)
We continued to see improvement in our community dialogue across the organization.
Crisis and emergency management
We were not able to schedule the corporate crisis simulation exercise during 2007.
Energy and greenhouse gas management
Our performance in energy and greenhouse gas management did not improve during 2007. We took a number of steps to raise the importance of greenhouse gas and climate change within the company, including participating in the Carbon Disclosure Project and developing an energy and greenhouse gas five-year SECA objectives. As a result of these steps to increase awareness we expect to report improvement in the coming years.
You can find more information and the results of our 2007 performance evaluations at www.mining.ca.
Global Reporting Initiative
The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) is an independent organization that seeks to make reporting on economic, environmental and social performance as routine and comparable as financial reporting. GRI, through a network of staff and volunteer-based working groups of experts from around the world, has developed the GRI reporting framework.
We use the GRI reporting framework as the basis for reporting most of our quantitative data on sustainability and for measuring our performance.
Inmet Mining Corporation self-declares that this report fulfills the requirements for a level B in accordance with the criteria set by the Global Reporting Initiative under the G3 framework. The Technical Protocols, Indicator Protocols and the Mining Sector Supplement (G2) guided the development of this report. GRI has not verified the contents of this report, nor does it take a position on the reliability of information reported in our annual sustainability report.
Devonshire Initiative
Inmet is a charter member and Working Group member of the Devonshire Initiative (DI). The Devonshire Initiative was launched by the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto in March 2007. It grew out of the multistakeholder national Corporate Social Responsibility Roundtables convened by the Canadian government to address corporate social responsibility by the Canadian extractive industry in developing countries.
The Roundtables highlighted the polarized and unproductive nature of the relationship between the extractive sector and a small segment of non-governmental organizations (NGO). To overcome this polarization and move towards productive, on-the-ground solutions to issues of mutual concern, development NGOs and some industry members have come together in a new dialogue that could see both sides working together in developing countries to achieve mutual objectives. This is an exciting opportunity and we are fully committed to the DI process.