The International Council on Minerals and Metals (ICMM) today released a 2021 safety performance report from its member companies that highlighted 43 fatalities among these firms last year.
ICMM members, the ICMM says, have an unwavering commitment to the health and safety of workers, and work unceasingly to eliminate fatalities and prevent injuries, towards a goal of zero harm. To support this commitment, ICMM compiles, analyses and publishes the safety data provided annually by company members, who collectively represent a third of the industry. The full report, ‘Safety Performance: Benchmarking Progress of ICMM Company Members In 2021′, is available here.
The 43 people from ICMM company members who lost their lives at work in 2021, compares with 44 in 2020, 287 in 2019 and 50 in 2018.
The report analyses fatalities from ICMM company members based on the cause (or ‘hazard’) and provides safety performance metrics by county and company. In 2021, 12 of these fatalities were related to mobile equipment and transportation, and eight fatalities were caused by ‘fall of ground’ incidents.
Company member operations in South Africa had the highest number of fatalities (27), accounting for 51% of the total fatalities across ICMM members. Eleven members reported zero fatalities including Alcoa, BHP, Boliden, Hydro, JX Nippon Mining & Metals, Minera San Cristobal, Minsur, MMG, Newcrest, Newmont and Rio Tinto.
Rohitesh Dhawan, President and CEO of the ICMM, said: “The health and safety of workers is of paramount importance to our members and therefore any year with even a single fatality is unacceptable.
“ICMM’s new three-year strategy is focused on ambitious collective action. Sharing lessons from failure is vital to improving safety, but it is not enough to achieve our goal of zero harm. As an industry, we can draw strength from how far we have come to drive down fatalities and injuries, but we will remain deeply uncomfortable until zero harm is actually achieved. We will work together to explore the root causes of why harm continues to occur and hunt for the next step change to make zero harm a reality.”
ICMM began collating and publishing company members’ safety data in 2012 with the aim of encouraging information and knowledge sharing among members, and catalysing learning across the industry. This data is compiled using ICMM’s ‘Guidance on Health and Safety Performance Indicators’ which was updated in 2021.
