Modern Quarrying October-November 2015

FACE TO FACE WITH ASPASA

Regional meetings MQ recently attended the Aspasa/ SARMA/IQSA regional meeting in the Western Cape where several very inter- esting presentations were made. Adrian Damant presented the AKR integrated software system for audits, while Bryan Keague discussed Nosa’s contractor ver- ification system. Santie Gouws’ paper on the Gouda Wind farm attracted a lot of interest together with solutions from Barnstone and Crushforce. It was a pleasure seeing Crowbar Solutions’Don Schoeman again, who pre- sented some significant insights into the readymix industry of today. These regional meetings have grown

makers and cement operations, lime, etc; if you don’t have a very strong industry on that side, infrastructure development can fall flat. “The Mining Charter checks two salient points – safety and health, and the environment, and our operations have to comply with both of these mainstream legislation components. There needs to be some form of consistent regulation on material for roads, for example. You can’t just dig the material out because there are environmental issues. This is some- thing that needs to be highlighted – the difference between a mine and a quarry. “Aspasa has achieved significant advances in safety, health and the envi- ronment, and this it will continue to advocate. We are ahead of the pack in this regard but there are many other import- ant issues that we are dealing with.”

that we don’t want to be regulated,” he stresses.“We don’t need these regulations to be counter-productive. The problem now is that we have our feet in both the mining and construction industries and believe the time has come for us to define our own sector’s regulations. “Mining legislation calls for many things but there is a grey area as far as quarrying is concerned in terms of SLPs, community interaction, education, etc, and these are challenges that our smaller operations sit with. They can’t afford to build schools at every point for example. There is a need for an industry differenti- ation. Quarrying is in mining, but it is also in construction,” he reiterates. “Infrastructure is crucial for a coun- try that is growing and if you don’t have infrastructure and the construction mate- rial suppliers which include quarries, brick

Photographed at the lookout point at Peninsula, Nico Pienaar (red hard hat) chats to attendees of the Western Cape regional meeting.

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MODERN QUARRYING October - November 2015