Modern Mining March 2023

MINING INDABA REVIEW

TOMRA Mining helps miners drive the green agenda As most mining houses have outlined their sustainability targets, the uptake of technologies to meet their decarbonisation drives remains front and centre, with miners actively seeking innovations to meet their agendas; including taking up technologies offered by sensor-based sorting specialist, TOMRA Mining. Although the Norwegian multinational’s focus remains on the Southern African diamond market, it continues to target opportunities in the green mining space. By Nelendhre Moodley .

Kai Bartram: global sales director at TOMRA Mining.

S peaking to Modern Mining at the Investing in African Mining Indaba held recently in Cape Town, TOMRA’s global sales director for min ing, Kai Bartram, says that TOMRA’s COM XRT 2.0 sorter, which targets the removal of large rocks during the early stages of the mining process, is becoming increasingly important in terms of sustainability. “By removing the waste material upfront, the amount of material that goes onto tailings dumps is reduced and no additional energy, water or chemicals are used for this barren material. This offers a significant energy sav ing as well as a lower carbon footprint. As such, our well-established technology is fast gaining traction in the gold, copper, platinum group metals and chrome spaces,” says Bartram. “Given the advantages the technology offers, Southern African mining companies are keen to acquire the machines and, to date, TOMRA has already installed several machines locally, including at chrome and platinum group metal operations,”

explains Bartram. On the back of strong demand from lithium miners, TOMRA continues to supply the product across a number of lithium projects, globally and locally. As larger mining houses are slower to adopt TOMRA’s COM XRT 2.0 sorter, the company’s big gest client-base, to date, are smaller to mid-tier mining operations that were quick to recognise and take advantage of TOMRA’s offering, which delivers improved workflow and lower energy consumption. Some of the COM XRT 2.0 product benefits include higher belt speed and throughput, which translates directly into increased productivity in mineral processing. A powerful X-Ray system accom modates the sorting of larger-sized material. For this larger-sized material, the technology is equipped with increased wear resistance to deliver longer component lifetime coupled with quick and safe maintenance through providing easier access to replaceable components. In the world largest sensor-based mining sorting plant, 9 COM XRT 2.0 processes almost 2000 t/h.

The Lesotho Legend diamond recovered by TOMRA’s sorter.

TOMRA’s sorting technology, the COM XRT 2.0.

Designed specifically for the mining industry, the COM XRT 2.0 combines a variety of leading-edge hard- and soft ware features with flexible sorting task configurations that meet the challenges of a dynamic market landscape. Further to this, TOMRA recently released a new upgrade package for its COM Tertiary machine which offers significantly reduced compressed air usage of between 70% and 80%. The COM Tertiary machine targets fine mate rial in the 5-35 mm particle category. “Given that the highest operat ing cost on the machine is associated with the uptake of compressed air, this huge reduction of compressed air usage translates to higher margins and

28  MODERN MINING  March 2023