Successfully Managing Silica Dust at Target

In line with Harmony’s commitment to ensuring our people live healthy, productive lives, we aim to align with industry best practice and meet our targets for occupational hygiene.

Silica dust is an undeniable threat to employees’ health, and Harmony continually works to improve our interventions to ensure we protect our people from preventable harm and align with or exceed industry targets.

Our Target 1 Mine in the Free State improved silica dust levels in FY23, supported by its silica dust management strategy. The mine exceeded the group’s target of 94.0% and achieved a milestone compliance rate of 98.7%, exceeding the industry milestone of 95.0% of personal silica dust samples below 0.05mg/m3 by 2024 for the second consecutive year. Encouragingly, the percentage of Target 1 employees classified as “A” homogeneous exposure group (defined as employees exposed to ≥0.1mg of silica dust per m³) decreased to 0.1% in FY23 from 87.6% in FY19.

Target 1’s silica dust management strategy supported these improvements by:

• Establishing a dust management task team
• Cleaning areas around the headgear, conveyor belt (surface), shaft barrel and abandoned shaft stations
• Preventing spillage from tipping activity at the headgear
• Improving shaft sprays
• Washing off dust accumulations on the conveyor decline
• Introducing conveyor, crusher, rock breaker and tip dust suppression sprays as well as foggers at loading points and a 282 Level rock breaker dust filtration system
• Linking real-time dust monitors to our supervisory control and data acquisition control system
• Rolling out awareness campaigns.

The remarkable silica dust improvements at Target 1 since FY19 illustrate how Harmony’s focus on managing airborne pollutants is making our workplace healthier. Looking forward, we aim to apply the learnings from Target 1’s year-on-year dust management success to improve milestone compliance at all our operations.