Air Quality Management

As a mining company, our primary causes of emissions and air pollution are drilling, blasting, hauling, collection and transportation. We monitor ambient air and stack emission quality and composition to the following regulations and guidelines:

• National Environmental Management: Air Quality Act 39 of 2004
• National Environmental Management: Air Quality Amendment Act 20 of 2014
• Department of Environmental Affairs’ guidelines
• World Health Organisation guidelines

Elikhulu currently holds a provisional atmospheric emission licence and the Group recently acquired an air quality licence for Fairview Mine in Barberton. Evander Gold Mines holds a variety of provisional atmospheric emission licences, which incorporate both the Kinross and Elikhulu plants.

All of our operations have dust monitoring and control programmes, with dust fallout levels at all operations well within the legal requirements. Generally accepted pollution control technologies are used to minimise fuel combustion emissions at our operations, such as sulphur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen oxides (NOx) and particulate matter.

At Evander Mines, we cultivate pioneer plant cover over the dormant tailings dams, with a similar vegetation programme on our active tailings dam to minimise dust emissions.

Temperatures in underground mines can rise to between 60° and 70° C at the rock face, so ventilation and cooling systems are essential to ensure employee safety and productivity. In the past, ozone depleting substances (ODS), such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were used in cooling systems. We have replaced all ODS across our operations with 134A refrigerant, which has only 10% of the global warming potential of the old coolant. Our operations do not produce, import or export ODSs.