Modern Mining April 2022

COPPER/COBALT

Jubilee Metals unlocks Zambian opportunities By Tavistock’s Jade Davenport (ESG Consultant) and Adam Baynes (Associate)

There are few instances in which the principal objectives of an international finance corporation and those of a commercial mining company overlap. And there are fewer still where those overlapping objectives are underpinned by the desire to improve the lot of society and the environment.

T his is what makes the collaboration between Jubilee Metals Group and the World Bank, on a large-scale environmental remediation and improvement project in Zambia, unusual and highly compelling. Jubilee Metals Group is a metals processing company with one calling – to remediate and extract value from the billons of tonnes of surplus ore and mine waste that are the legacy of historic mining practices. According to Jubilee’s CEO, Leon Coetzer, it was this mission that in 2018 compelled the company to investigate the possibility of expanding its footprint into Zambia, one of Africa’s stalwart mining jurisdic tions. In the hundred years since commercial mining activities began in that area, vast quantities of sur plus ore and mine waste have been generated and deposited in tailings storage facilities across the country. In fact, it is estimated that there are around 1.9 billion tonnes of waste mine material contained in dozens of tailings dumps across Zambia, some of which hold economic potential for a company with the right skills and expertise to unlock that value. “The timing of our entry into Zambia in 2018 was fortuitous as it was at roughly the same time the World Bank commissioned an investigation into a tailings rehabilitation and environmental project,

valued at around $20-million, the principal aim of which was to reduce the environmental and health risks in critically polluted mining areas,” explains Coetzer. The project consisted of the remediation of contamination hotspots and the improvement of environmental infrastructure; and rehabilitation of tailings dam and mine closure in the Copperbelt. The initial focus areas of the World Bank’s project, the Zambia Mining and Environmental Remediation and Improvement Project (ZMERIP), were the Chingola, Kabwe, Kitwe and Mufulira municipalities, sites of Zambia’s most intensive mining activities over the past century and, therefore, host to some of the largest tailings facilities in the country. Given an historical lack of stringent environmen tal regulations and controls, or any real mine closure and rehabilitation requirements, much of the mine waste generated was deposited as cheaply and efficiently as possible. This inevitably resulted in considerable potential environmental and health complications for the communities living in the vicini ties of those facilities, a fact illustrated principally in the Kabwe municipality. Up until the mid-1990s, Kabwe was home to one of the largest lead smelters in the world and as a result high levels of lead are found in the

Leon Coetzer, CEO of Jubilee Metals.

Jubilee’s Roan processing plant, Zambia.

40  MODERN MINING  April 2022