Sustainable mining in Brazil

The sustainable development of Brazilian mining is no longer an opportunity, it is a necessity for its survival; however, this pressure could be positive in terms of promoting the sector's competitiveness and thus making it possible to take advantage of Brazil's enormous mineral potential.

This path goes through innovation and management improvement, and there are new technologies and mechanisms to encourage innovation that can strongly contribute to leverage Brazilian mining and the socioeconomic development of mining regions.

The big challenge is to change the way miners think in order to establish inclusive mining models and thereby change the perception of public agents and society about the sector, and thus contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals established by the UN to be achieved by 2030 (ODS).

A project was recently developed at the Mining Hub on the sustainable use of CSN's tailings (Link to the demoday presentation: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54pFD8PnBYI&feature=youtu.be). The Support Center for Mineração da USP (NAP.Mineração/USP) carried out an assessment of the potential contribution of this project to the ODS-UN/2030 and the summary of the result is presented in Figure 01.

In Figure 01, the great potential contribution of mining to the 17 SDGs can be seen, where the project has a high impact for 9, medium to 4, low to 1 and irrelevant to 3. This can occur in any region, but how often mining is located in underdeveloped areas and, depending on its business strategy, it can contribute a lot to the sustainable development of the region where it operates and for the internalization of the SDGs.

It is important to emphasize that the transformation of mining involves the adoption of innovations and that there are mechanisms to encourage innovation that reduce the associated risks, these mechanisms allow using the installed capacity of science and technology institutes (ICTs) for the development of projects, non-refundable and subsidized financing, and tax incentives. With this, it is possible to develop, with low investment, large projects with high quality, facilitating their acceptance by the local community and speeding up environmental licensing.

The challenge is posed, the conditions for overcoming it are available, but as Einstein said, "insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expect different results", that is, if the transformation does not occur at the desired speed, it is because there are cultural barriers need to be eliminated.