Benchmarking mining principles

This month the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM) published a series of equivalency benchmarks comparing mining principles.

The work compares the requirements of ICMM’s Mining Principles with the World Gold Council’s Responsible Gold Mining Principles (RGMPs), the Mining Association of Canada’s Towards Sustainable Mining (TSM) programme, the Aluminium Stewardship Initiative (ASI) Performance Standard, the Responsible Mineral Initiative’s Risk Readiness Assessment (RRA) and the Copper Mark.

Recognising stakeholder concerns around responsible production, and the recent proliferation of sustainability standards, ICMM has undertaken this exercise alongside each standard owner with three key aims:

• Simplification – support investors, customers, and other stakeholders in their understanding of how these standards address a range of sustainability concerns, and the extent to which there are similarities and differences between them.
• Efficiency – make self-assessment and/or 3rd party validation processes more efficient for mining companies, including situations where validation is conducted for two or more standards at the same time.
• Transparency – promote transparency around mining and metals sector standards and validation processes.

This has been a collaborative process and the benchmarks published have been agreed and/or accepted by each standard owner. The list of standards being benchmarked against ICMM’s Mining Principles is not finite, with other relevant standards being assessed in time. You can view each equivalency benchmark here.