Mining’s Oldest Waste Is Becoming Its Newest Line Item
For most of mining history, tailings marked the end of the story. Ore went into the mill, metal came out, and whatever remained was pumped behind an earthen wall and largely forgotten. If tailings showed up in the financial statements at all, it was as the cost of closing the facility that held them.Brazil ended that arrangement. After two tailings dam failures in Minas Gerais in 2015 and 2019, the country enacted Law 14.066 on September 30, 2020. It prohibits building or raising mining dams by the upstream method and required every existing upstream dam to be decommissioned, a process ...