Today, the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM) launched a Closure Maturity Framework – an interactive tool that will “help mining and metals companies to establish a clearer view of their asset’s current levels of maturity on their journey to achieving sustainable mine closure. The tool will assist them in understanding what future work is needed to achieve their closure objectives with the goal of driving continuous improvement in closure performance.”

The Closure Maturity Framework is designed to help companies map their current position, motivate improvement and measure the state of their operations’ progress towards sustainable closure. It outlines a pathway towards achieving desired post-closure land uses and closure vision while considering relevant aspects of mine design, operations and technology.

Aidan Davy, COO, ICMM, says: “To achieve sustainable outcomes that are beneficial to a company and its employees, the environment and host communities, mine closure must be considered as an integral part of an operations’ core business and effectively integrated across the mining life cycle. Through the use of tools like ICMM’s Closure Maturity Framework, companies are able to identify mine closure threats and opportunities from the earliest stages of mining so that these can be proactively managed and the risk reduced. It also makes it easier and more cost effective to achieve final closure objectives through effective integration.”

The Closure Maturity Framework tool has two components:

1) A User Guide that describes each of the maturity levels and helps companies categorise the status of their sites

2) An interactive Excel Tool that helps companies assess closure maturity at the site level.

“It can serve as a communication tool that drives conversation between different business units and levels of a company to converge thinking and align decision making. It can also facilitates the aggregation of results from multiple sites to enable companies to understand closure performance within a portfolio.”

As part of ICMM’s Mining Principles, its members commit to plan and design for closure in consultation with relevant authorities and stakeholders, implement measures to address closure-related environmental and social aspects, and make financial provision to enable agreed closure and post-closure commitments to be realised. To support its members and the wider industry in this:

• In 2019, ICMM published an Integrated Mine Closure: Good Practice Guide to help companies plan for an effective, integrated and responsible mine closure.
• In 2020, ICMM published ‘Key Performance Indicators: Tool for closure’ designed to help companies develop context-relevant performance indicators that drive accountability to support implementation of good closure practices at an operational level throughout the mine life cycle.

Both the Closure Maturity Framework and KPI Tool were developed as practical tools to supplement those within the Integrated Mine Closure: Good Practice Guide to help companies embed the good practice within the guide into their operations, and the ICMM says should be used together with the Guide.