Why miners have failed to prevent waste dam disasters

In January 2019, a mine waste dam at the Córrego do Feijão iron mine in Brazil collapsed, killing 270 people, obliterating parts of the community of Brumadinho, and flooding the Paraopeba River ecosystem with 12m cubic metres of mine waste. 

Vale, the mine’s owner, is the third-largest mining company in the world. The catastrophe followed on the heels of massive tailings dam collapses at the Mount Polley gold-copper mine in British Columbia, Canada operated by Imperial Metals and at BHP and Vale’s Samarco joint iron mining venture in Mariana, Brazil. 

The Brumadinho catastrophe stunned the mining industry and investors, but should not have come as a surprise. It was a tragedy foretold, both predicted and avoidable: a result of prioritising profits over safety and ignoring clear warning signals. Despite the hand-wringing by mining companies that a disaster like Samarco should never again occur, it did — and unfortunately will again, absent meaningful safeguards.

Keeping communities and the environment safe from tailings dams is more urgent than ever. Independent research examining trends in mining waste failures since 1915 shows that severe mining waste failures are occurring more frequently, and that without significant changes in policy and practice, they will continue to increase in severity and frequency. Across the world, thousands of communities in the shadow of similar tailings dams live in a state of perpetual anxiety: will they be the next? 

The sequence of tragedies from Mount Polley to Brumadinho shocked the investment community into long-overdue action. Led by the Church of England’s pension fund, in 2019 a group of 96 investors controlling $10tn in assets wrote to 680 mining companies demanding they publicly disclose their tailings dam failure risks.

Investor pressure along with the industry’s urgent need to burnish its public image and avoid potential mandatory requirements led to the swift rollout of the Global Tailings Review, co-convened by the International Council on Mining and Metals, along with the investor group and the UN Environment Programme “to establish an international standard for the safer management of tailings storage facilities.” 

Will the changes proposed go far enough to prevent the next disaster — and will they be implemented in a timely and meaningful way? History gives us reason to be sceptical.

In response to the 2014 Mount Polley disaster, the British Columbia provincial government commissioned an independent expert panel to investigate the failure and make recommendations to prevent future disasters. The recommendations of the panel were not adopted, not even at Mount Polley, and not by ICMM.

In the aftermath of the failure of Fundão Dam, Vale’s former chief executive Fabio Schvartsman declared “Mariana never again”. The company hired experts, released in-depth reports, publicly committed to safety and invested in extensive marketing. A few years later, Vale faced the disaster in Brumadinho.

The mining industry cannot be the entity to establish best practice requirements, or police itself on their implementation. Tailings dam tragedies are a stark reminder of the consequences of allowing a mining company to control its auditors and silence dissent among its workers. 

Establishing and enforcing safety protocols must be independent of company control, and must be established through multi-stakeholder processes that actively engage workers, communities and civil society. 

As the GTR prepares to unveil the results of its review, an international group of scientists, communities and civil society groups have published guidelines for more responsible tailings storage that prioritise safety over cost. 

The guidelines stipulate that facilities must be built and managed only with community consent, adopting the best available technologies and practices, and under independent monitoring. They contend that strong standards must ensure independent financial guarantees for environmental contamination, accountability at the highest level, public participation in decisions and reliable grievance mechanisms to ensure that communities and workers can raise the alarm without consequences. 

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Recent history has shown that the mining sector will not choose the path to reduce the risks of tailings dams without external pressure. While the Global Tailings Standard has the potential to be a step in the right direction, it must require significant and even difficult changes to how the mining industry operates. Without these preventive measures, communities will remain at risk for more frequent and severe mining disasters.

Payal Sampat is the mining program director of Earthworks, a non-profit dedicated to protecting communities and the environment from the adverse impacts of resource extraction. 

While Ms Sampat serves on the Global Tailings Review advisory panel and the board of the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, she speaks only on behalf of Earthworks, not any of these other bodies.   

The Commodities Note is an online commentary on the industry from the Financial Times