At our Constancia operation in Peru, our haul trucks go through around 180 tires per year. At more than seven feet in diameter, these huge tires generate a significant amount of waste when they reach the end of their life. In Peru, there is no facility to process end-of-life tires, so many mining companies will usually dump the tires, warehouse them or try to find another use for them (e.g., road barriers).
Beginning in 2020, our team in Peru began working with a company in Arequipa to help it obtain the necessary permits for creating a plant to recycle the tires. The recycling process treats the tires and turns the material into small plastic pellets that can be used for the maintenance of synthetic turf athletic fields and for other purposes.
Once the plant was up and running in 2020, our Constancia operation became the first mine site in Peru to recycle its haul truck tires. In 2020, 185 tires were recycled, and that number jumped to nearly 300 in 2021, reducing the number of end-of-life tires at the mine site by half. The recycling process has also resulted in significant transportation and disposal cost savings.
Another cost-effective waste management tool Constancia uses is its “waste express” system, which processes all the organic waste from the accommodation camp and removes the water, decreasing the volume of solid waste by 50%. We are in the process of testing how different bacteria forms can be used to turn this waste into compost. Once the final solution is selected and implemented (which we expect to happen by the end of 2022), we will be able to process around 90% of all organic waste at Constancia for compost, significantly reducing the amount of solid waste we need to transport to an outside waste management facility.
We are also working to obtain a permit to take the sludge from our waste water treatment plant and treat it so that it can be used for topsoil enrichment. We currently send the sludge to the dump, but if the new permit is approved, we can both improve topsoil and save money by avoiding the need to dispose of the sludge.