Dump Clean-Up

DRD Gold spends R26m in six months on environmental restoration.

- Martin Creamer

Johannesburg is probably one of the world’s best examples of unintended sustainable development, where almost accidentally the mining economy has been fully replaced by another larger economy.

This is because mining took place for long enough to allow for the emergence of services industries such as banking, manufacturing, technology and many others that have developed around mining and outlived it.

Very little mining takes place around Johannesburg anymore, other than the recovery of gold from mine dumps that is being carried out by the Johannesburg- and New York-listed DRDGold, which employs 2 000 people that move vast quantities of mined material into processing plants.

Yet, Johannesburg is the economic powerhouse of the African continent as a consequence of mining gold in and around it.

But for the fact that gold was discovered here 130 years ago, what is Johannesburg today would have been farmland.

There is also an ugly side to mining’s legacy and testimony to that are the many mine dumps scattered along the Reef, which have to be cleaned up.

Having been part of the initial days of mining in Johannesburg, DRDGold is now part of the environmental restoration stage.

“We were here before radio,” DRDGold CEO Niël Pretorius said, in reference to Marconi sending a wireless radio wave over long distances in 1896, a year after the company – which last week announced a 4% increase in operating profit to R172.6-million on 7% lower gold output for the six months to December 31 – came into existence.