Reimagining Mine Closure

The race to mine relinquishment has become one of the most significant challenges for mining companies. In response, the mining industry has been compelled to challenge the process of relinquishment and consider new approaches to closure with the potential to provide long-term opportunity and shared growth for all regional stakeholders.

To enable this paradigm shift, Coeuraj partnered with Environmental Resources Management (ERM), the world's largest global sustainability and engineering consulting firm, to design a comprehensive, multi-year process to convene a number of the largest mining companies in the world, national and local governments, regulators, communities, and other regional stakeholders to reimagine closure and post-closure outcomes across three pilot sites.

Coeuraj lead the delivery of a collaborative design journey, facilitating dialogue and problem-solving between stakeholders.
By engaging a wide range of stakeholders to define a shared vision and address everyone's interests, our process has shifted communication patterns from bi-lateral exchanges of information, historically led by mining organizations, to multi-stakeholder dialogue.

Our work supported the development of a new approach to mine closure founded on the idea that a mine can provide rich opportunities for collaboration, innovation, and mutual benefit long after it closes.

Throughout this process, participants were able to expand their thinking beyond the fence line of a mine site to include the region in which it operates, reframe liabilities and losses into collective opportunities, and form multi-stakeholder partnerships.

To learn more about the Reimagining Mining project, you can visit this virtual open house that provides details on one of the pilot sites and our current phase of work.