Environmental Aspects of Phosphate and Potash Mining United ...

Environmental Aspects of Phosphate and Potash Mining
4. Emerging Environmental Issues and Trends
The environmental performance of the fertilizer raw
material mining industry has improved over recent
decades, as has that of other industry sectors.
Significant causes include:
Growing public awareness of environmental
issues;
Greater appreciation by companies of the environmental
issues;
Increasing regulation;
Scientific and technical progress that permits resolution
of some of the issues;
Technological developments that improve environmental
performance as a by-product of better
efficiency.
Today information is available much more easily than
in the past, through media such as the Internet, while
the understanding of the issues and of the underlying
problems and linkages continues to progress.
A number of emerging issues and trends may affect
the industry in coming years, including:
Consumers as a political and economic force;
The public's demand for accountability and transparency
across the board, for both businesses and
government;
Sensitivities about globalization;
A multidisciplinary approach to resolving issues
Ongoing public debate on what constitutes sustainability
and good environmental performance;
Increasingly stringent expectations of environmental
performance;
Scrutiny of business at a local and international
level.
As community awareness has grown, demands on
industry have increased accordingly. In many countries,
both industry and governments are becoming
more accountable for the decisions and actions they
take. This is partly because of the increased availability
of information concerning their actions and more
stakeholder involvement in the decision-making
process. The general public increasingly demands
involvement in decision-making on issues that affect
them. This was evident in a variety of situations at the
operations visited in preparation of the present report.
Likewise the public is requiring companies to demonstrate
their environmental (and social) performance.
This requires an effective monitoring system to measure
the impacts of a company's activities and often a
reporting system to communicate their achievements
to stakeholders. External, third party verification
increases the plausibility of company statements and
provides stakeholders with an independent assurance.
A number of fertilizer mining companies are signatories
to voluntary codes of practice such as the chemical
industry's Responsible Care® program or The
Australian Mining Industry Code for Environmental
Management. These codes implicitly recognize the
importance of monitoring and reporting. An independent
international mining certification system to
assess environmental management performance is an
option to secure environmental accountability.
In future, community concerns may shift away from a
focus on environmental damage at the mine site to the
need to balance competing demands for limited natural
resources such as fresh water and agricultural land.
The mining industry, as a consumer of natural
resources, will not be isolated from these pressures.
Foresight and the adoption of adequate and effective
solutions to arising issues will assist the industry's
response.
Governments are responding to community pressure
through new legislation. The European Union's
Integrated Product policy is one such response. Policy
implementation will lead to increasing producer
responsibility for their products. It will also increase
the use of market instruments to internalize the external
environmental costs of products over their entire
life cycle. This responsibility will concern not only
companies' own activities but also those of their suppliers,
transporters and service providers.
What should companies do in order to meet
these current and future challenges
Several approaches to environmental issues are
reviewed in Part 2 of the IFA/UNEP/UNIDO publication
entitled “Environmental Management
Systems”(7). Topics discussed include:
Compliance with the ISO 9000 and ISO 14000
series of standards;
Environmental impact, risk and life cycle assessments;
(7) See Appendix A for reference.