Rehabilitating tailings dams for environmental and socio-economic benefits

We have multiple TSF projects at many of our operations that integrate environmental stewardship and socio-economic development imperatives to drive our support of SDG 15. Harmony is taking action to reduce the degradation of land impacted by our mining activities and increase our efforts to restore natural habitats in affected areas.

One of these projects is restoring vegetation at our TSFs. The vegetation of TSFs is vital to prevent water pollution and wind erosion, and should allow for the creation of a sustainable basal cover and promote ecological succession. Vegetation has a variety of other benefits such as the sequestration of carbon, improved visual impact, dust suppression, the potential removal of metals from the tailings material and biodiversity enhancement.

In alignment with the goals of our rehabilitation strategy, Harmony planted 650 indigenous trees (white and black karee, sweet thorn and river bushwillow) and other vegetation (turf and Rhodes grass) on the previously exposed 55ha top surface of the ARM 1 TSF in the Free State. Enabling local socio-economic growth and development, we contracted a local external service provider to supply and plant the trees, and all earth moving equipment employees were from local companies.

Additionally, the project contributed to job creation, employing 38 local people from the start of the project through to project completion and maintenance work.