acQuire Connected episode 45: Driving environmental performance in the mining industry through data 

In the latest episode of the acQuire Connected podcast, Claire Cote, Director of the Centre for Water in the Minerals Industry at the University of Queensland’s Sustainable Minerals Institute, and Stuart van de Water, Environmental Leader at acQuire, discuss how to define and measure environmental performance in the mining and resources industry, and why it’s important to position your environmental data as a strategic business asset rather than just a box-ticking exercise. 

The definition of environmental performance in the resources industry has long been debated, and the University of Queensland is currently undertaking research to understand what it really means to be ‘environmentally compliant’ while also delivering reliable and meaningful performance. 

As Claire Cote explains, their research has identified a number of key parameters that form part of a ‘portfolio of activities’ required to make a company environmentally compliant. These include: 

• understanding of the environmental risks and putting plans in place to mitigate them, 

• ensuring environmental management strategies are adapted to the risk profile; it’s not one size fits all approach, 

• assigning performance targets to each environmental aspect,  

• allocating appropriate resources to environmental management, including skilled personnel and supporting tools, and 

• seeking expert knowledge when required. 

“The company, the mine, everybody should be agreeing that environmental performance is important. That forms part of your collective mindset,” said Claire. 

Stuart adds that measuring environmental performance requires a “holistic view of why we’re doing these things and how everything’s related and multidisciplinary. These are the things we’re trying to measure. And as they say: if you can measure it, you can improve it. That’s why it’s important because as we know, these can ultimately be published externally into the community, into the public domain, and you can face scrutiny by interested and sometimes very motivated parties.” 

One of the biggest misconceptions in the industry, says Claire, is the confusion between what an environmental data management system is and what companies think it is.  

“In corporate teams, because they’re really good with safety reporting and safety management systems and they all have amazing systems and software to do that, they tend to think, ‘oh, well let’s just add environmental data to that’. But it’s different.  

“I see it as a pyramid: Your environmental data management system is the base of your pyramid where you have all your raw environmental data coming in, where you do all your analysis, where you understand your environmental risk profile, et cetera… That cannot be done with an ESG type system or a safety health environment type system. They’re completely different. The systems can talk to each other, you can have reports from one feeding into the other, but you need both. You cannot manage raw and vital data with an SHE or ESG-type system. They’re too high level.” 

While it may not be immediately obvious, Claire and Stuart also emphasise why positioning environmental data as a strategic business asset is critical. “With environmental data, the outcomes aren’t always immediately visible. If you’re doing the wrong thing, you might not notice for years or even generations. Yet it can have a significant long‑term impact,” shares Stuart.  

He adds, “Some businesses operate on the mindset of ‘as long as we make a profit and tick the box for compliance, we’re great.’ But the really good ones say, ‘That’s good, but how can we make sure we’re also achieving growth with profitability to make sure we have a healthy business, not just now, but in the future?’ It’s about shifting the mindset from doing compliance to prove you’re not doing anything wrong, to doing it to prove you’re doing the right things.” 

He suggests reframing environmental data from being about risk avoidance to creating long‑term value. 

“What if, instead of focusing solely on compliance, your system could measure stability? What if it could demonstrate how well you’ve managed impacts over time? Suddenly, it becomes a win-win for the company. Maybe you can lessen the amount of environmental monitoring needed, which can be costly. It’s people adopting a mindset that sees environmental stewardship as a positive, long-term investment, not just a box ticking exercise.” 

Claire agrees, adding, “We are seeing a lot more integration of environmental aspect in mine planning, for instance. They’re starting to think, ‘how can I do this so that water has less of an impact in my production days?’. This is a big shift that we are seeing a lot more of.” 

To learn more about how companies are using environmental data as a strategic business asset from Claire Cote and Stuart van de Water, listen to the full podcast episode below. 

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Read the full transcript here: 

Intro (00:00): Welcome to acQuire Connected, the podcast that is your compass in the world of data across environmental, social and governance.

Jaimee Nobbs (00:10): Welcome to the acQuire Connected podcast. I’m Jaimee Nobbs, your host for this episode, and today we’re joined by two great speakers with a wealth of knowledge in the environmental space. First up, we have Claire Cote, Director of the Centre for Water in the Minerals Industry at the University of Queensland’s Sustainable Minerals Institute. They’re doing world-leading research into developing knowledge-based solutions to meet the global sustainability challenges facing the resources industry. And Claire is joined by Stuart van de Water, Environmental Leader at acQuire. If that name sounds familiar, Stu has featured on some previous episodes, but we’ve invited him back on this episode to chat with Claire today about driving environmental performance in the mining industry and data’s role in that. So let’s get started.

Hi Claire and Stu, thanks for joining today. It’s great to have you on here. To kick us off, can you tell us a bit about your background and how you came into the world of environmental management within the mining and resources sector? Stu, would you like to kick off?

Stuart van de Water (01:08): Yeah, no worries. Well, actually, funnily enough, I’m a software developer by trade and I guess one of the original developers of our EnviroSys product. So I’ve learned it, I guess from what you’d say, almost the other side of the fence, Claire, better talk much more to the environmental side and from I guess a mining customer’s perspective and also research perspective. But I guess from my perspective, having I guess, grown up with the EnviroSys product, I’ve done everything from build it, sell it, implement it, support it, everything in between. So I guess it really does give us a pretty unique insight into how that translates into systems. Spend a lot of time on sites, which gives you a very good crash course into how things need to work, practically the people involved, which is actually really important to understand when we get into managing the environment. So yeah, that’s where I’ve come from and my perspectives that I’ll hopefully bring today.

Jaimee Nobbs (02:00): Thanks Stu, you’re getting pretty good at the introductions. I know you’ve been on the podcast a few times. And how about yourself, Claire?

Claire Cote (02:08): Well, my background is actually in water resources management. That’s what I did my engineering degree in, but I was recruited into the University of Queensland Sustainable Minerals Institute and that was my first foray into mining. And I found that I really enjoyed it because there were so many water-related aspects in mining that as a water person, it was really, really interesting. After the floods in Queensland in 2010/ 2011, I got a role with Anglo American to assist with dealing with the aftermath of the floods. They were starting to think they might need people with good water-related skills to assist with that process. So I ended up spending eight years at Anglo American and I managed to get support to implement EnviroSys at Anglo American operations. So I know the EnviroSys system quite well because I implemented it and I had a role with the software developers to set up an obligation module as well to focus a bit more strongly on compliance. I’m now back at the Sustainable Minerals Institute and trying to bring those industry insights into our research portfolio. We’ve got a strong focus on the environmental performance of the mining sector. The water aspect is still very strong, it’s still very much part of that, but we have a broader view as well as we cover the entire environmental function.

Jaimee Nobbs (03:26): It’s a really interesting background. It’s interesting that you both stumbled into that water management environmental performance management kind of area. You didn’t start or, you didn’t plan to go into that. You both kind of ended up in that space. When we talk about environmental performance in mining, what are you actually referring to there and why does it matter in the context of managing a mine site?

Claire Cote (03:50): Now, back at SMI, we actually have a research program specifically on this and identifying what does it mean to be environmentally compliant? And we talk about reliability as well. How do you deliver reliable and vital performance? And we identified five or six items as part of that portfolio of activities. One is really understanding the risks, so knowing the environmental risks really well and having plans in place to mitigate them. Two is ensuring the environmental management strategies are adapted to the risk profile. So it’s not a one size fits all. So you understand your risk, you develop strategies to manage the risk that you have specifically to the mine or to the context. There should be performance targets. For each environmental aspect, there should be appropriate resources allocated to environmental management. And by appropriate resources it’s the skills of people, sufficient people, but also the tools like a data management system that forms part of the resource portfolio that are required. Expert knowledge is sought when required, and all these should form part of what we call a collective mindset. So the company, the mine, everybody should be agreeing that environmental performance is important. And that forms part of your collective mindset.

Jaimee Nobbs (05:04): How long has that definition of environmental performance been around? Is that new?

Claire Cote (05:09): Yes, it is an outcome of our research program. We have a virtual network here at UQ called the Leading for High Reliability Centre. It’s a network of researchers both in the technical disciplines and psychological organisations. So with the school of psychology, the thinking really comes from safety. So there’s been a lot of work on trying to improve safety, not just in the mining sector, but what we are doing is drawing what we’ve learned from all the work done on safety and trying to apply it to environmental management. And this is brand new. No one’s done that before. So we’ve got a few early career researchers looking at this with a few publications, and we’re trying to broaden our network of companies and mines who might be interested in exploring this with us further.

Stuart van de Water (05:54): And it’s very interesting, I guess from say a software vendor side and see how that translates into how the systems need to perform that. As Claire said, initially around getting an obligation register in and now something that helps us focus on why we’re doing the environmental management. And often it’s regulatory drivers, but there’s also community industry, even internal as well. So there’s a whole range of stakeholders, drivers, there’s people who are doing it just because they have to. Some people who are managing it are very passionate environmental professionals. So you really need to have that, as Claire said, that holistic view of why we’re doing things, how everything’s related, so multidisciplinary and ultimately something that helps us go well. These are the things we’re actually trying to measure. And I guess as they say, if you can measure it, you can improve it. That’s why it’s really important because as we know, these can ultimately be published externally into the community, into the public domain, face scrutiny, by interested and sometimes very motivated parties. So yeah, it’s a very important part. And it’s great to see that UoQ SMI is leading the way there in terms of bringing something that is a risk-based thing, it’s the people aspect of it. It’s the poor people who have to manage this thing on site that are probably underfunded, under-resourced, stretched to the limits. They don’t knwo what they don’t know. There are a lot of things at play there and to bring that sort of risk and psychological part to it. So yeah, very interesting to hear.

Jaimee Nobbs (07:23): So if this is quite a new study, what’s been done in the past? What has kind of triggered this research?

Claire Cote (07:29): So the thinking is not new. The thinking comes from research that was done in the United States in the eighties and nineties and they were looking at industry that have a lot of risks, but then nothing wrong ever happens. And they were wondering, well, what’s different about them? Why is it that they can manage this sort of risk and then there’s no accident? So the typical examples are the air traffic controllers, there’s planes everywhere, there’s cameras everywhere. And yes, we hardly ever hear of planes flying into each other. The nuclear sector as well is really interesting. So out of observing how those companies behaved, they made some recommendations and then that research is around, it was applied in the health sector a lot and the education sector. And then there was a review of fatalities in the mining sector in Queensland a few years ago. And they said in that review that the outcomes from that research should be applied to the mining sector here in Australia, but they were thinking just safety.
And then we grabbed that. I said, but it’s not just about safety. There’s lots of other risks that need to be managed and that thinking can be really useful. And the sort of things we’re thinking about is tailings management. We’ve had a lot of tailings dam failures where that thinking can be brought in to better manage tailings and information management is a big part of that. There’s a lot of information that needs to feed into tailings management. In fact, sorry, I’m getting a bit sidetracked here, but there’s a global standard now for tailings management and one part of a fundamental part of that standard is a knowledge database. So it is actually identified that data management systemsan are absolutely a fundamental part of environmental performance.

Stuart van de Water (09:06): I think that’s really interesting. And I guess the examples of being driven, say by looking at planes, health, those sort of things; when they go wrong, people can die. And I guess having that really tangible outcome that everyone agrees is pretty horrific does drive behaviours.
With environmental data it sometimes seems like the outcomes are invisible. If we’re doing the wrong thing, we may not see them or maybe for a generation, but it can have really significant impact. And I think the tailings ones, there have been some pretty bad disasters in that area which have impacted life. But just generally I think people are getting a better understanding of the impact and being better custodians of the planet effectively. And that’s where this starts to come in. I think even with looking at decarbonisation and those sort of things as well, people are starting to get it and I think to be far more receptive of these sort of concepts.

Jaimee Nobbs (10:00): And I guess the scarier part of tailings dam failures as well is it’s not just a one-off event; it can impact the water around the area. It can impact the biodiversity for years to come. It’s not a singular event, it’s something that can affect generations, which is, I guess it makes sense that there is so much research around how we can improve our risk management in those areas. When we talk about measuring environmental performance, Stu, what shifts have you seen over the years working in environmental data management?

Stuart van de Water (10:35): Yeah, it’s an interesting one because really it always distils down into a target, a metric or a condition. It’s been pretty consistent, but then it’s the frameworks that get applied onto that and what we’re trying to focus on. So there always seems to be a bit of a flavour of the time reporting scheme, some sort of sustainability initiative that sort of ebbs and flows. But I guess these days the sort of targets that we’re seeing a bit more prevalent now. So with ESG frameworks do carbonization initiatives, those sort of things, everyone works towards reductions and targets and those sort of things as well. So that’s sort of a bit more of the shift that we’ve seen in terms of how we measure these things. But ultimately, as Claire sort of said right from the bat about having that idea of having the compliance of driving while we’re doing these things and trying to measure to that, are we meeting the objectives that are set down that we’ve agreed to from whatever stakeholders that we’re looking at? So I think that hopefully fundamentally shouldn’t change, but then how we utilise that data and how we report on it does shift a bit.

Jaimee Nobbs (11:40): And Claire, you’ve got an interesting transition I guess from the industry side of things to the research side of things. You’ve seen both sides now. How is your perspective on, I guess the role of data in environmental performance evolved over time?

Claire Cote (11:57): It hasn’t. It’s still very important. I still regard it as being so critical. So here at SMI, we are very much industry focused. So we still deal a lot with industry and have one-on-one relationships with different minds. So we still have that industry vision. So we are not like academic sitting somewhere that are slightly disconnected from the real world as they say. We are very much connected to it. But what happens is where, see if you work for a company like Anglo American and you just know the Anglo American operations, so being an academic is great because I get a vision of a multitude of minds with different context and different risks. So it’s great because it broadens your vision, but what it does, it reemphasized again, the importance of really good data management. And we still see a lot of mines who don’t have a good system to manage the data. We do a lot of studies with mines where the first thing we do is ask for the data and then it comes in PDF reports and no one’s analysed it and it’s just not. And then of course, they don’t have the overall vision of what the environmental risk profile is. So we still do a lot of that work, assisting mines with data management and providing them with advice.

Stuart van de Water (13:09): Yeah, isn’t it funny that being a software vendor, we almost have the same scenario that we do see a broad number of customers that, hey, give us your data to get into the system. It’s PDFs, it’s scanned, it’s some of those really incredible data management mistakes that people make and it’s large companies that should be well resourced and should know better. And what was the talk we did recently called The struggle is real, it’s just mind blowing that some of the scenarios can come across that we, even yesterday my project manager sent me a screenshot of trying to get some information on a pretty critical project we’re doing from a customer who said, oh, by the way, I’m on site, please get onto this person. And then the other person’s out of office said, I’m on site, please get onto the other person. So that sort of lack of coordination and you’re imagining what may be falling through the cracks when these sort of things are happening? Yeah, it’s quite interesting to be able to see that from that perspective.

Claire Cote (14:08): And what we see a lot is a confusion between what environmental data management is and what companies think it is. So in the corporate teams, they think because they’re really good with safety reporting and safety management system and they all have amazing systems to do that and software to do that. And they tend to think, oh, well let’s just add environmental data to that. But it’s different. I see it as a pyramid. Your environ data management system is the base of your pyramid where you have all your raw environmental data coming in where you do all your analysis, where you understand your environ risk profile, et cetera. And there’s a lot of data and Stuart can explain just the type of data they deal with between water, real-time weather, dust, fluora, et cetera. So there’s an enormous amount of data that are being generated and these can be analysed and compiled and fed to the sector reporting system if needs be or the CMS system if needs be. But you still need that layer of managing and bridal data first. And that cannot be done with an ESG type system or a safety health environment type system. They’re completely different. The systems can talk to each other. Of course you can have reports from one feeding into the other, but you need both. You cannot manage raw and vital data with a she MS system or an ESG type system. They’re too high level.

Stuart van de Water (15:30): It’s really funny, we know of a really large miner who decided to insource their environmental data management and said, are we going to use the same system if it can park a ship, it can manage environmental data. A couple of years later, they’re now going out for a global environmental system because apparently it can park a ship but it can’t manage environmental data. So for those exact reasons and that was part of getting the support to implement EnviroSys at Anglo, I spent about a year or two talking to the CMS type people about the difference between the two systems and why we needed both. And then what doing, if you recall, we rewrote a lot of customised reports so that the two system could talk to each other, but the business case was built on understanding the difference between collecting raw and vital data and providing all the reports to the C-M-S-C-M-S system. They corporate reports, they’re very different things.

Jaimee Nobbs (16:27): So you’ve given one really good example there of the health and safety department and how environmental data management plays into that. Are there other decisions that companies can make based on environmental data that can ultimately impact their operations?

Claire Cote (16:43): They publish sustainability reports every year that are targeting investors. And very few of companies, and I’m talking the top 10 members of ICMM here, the International Council of Mining and Metals. We actually did a review of the sustainability reports recently of the top 10 ICMM members. They don’t refer to the environmental data at all. There are no mention of environmental data, very little, and they tend to focus those reports I’ve written to investors much more so than communicate to environmental performance. And part of this I think is the people writing the reports don’t know where the universal data are and what they can do with it. And I think that’s quite striking when you read those reports, you think, oh, no one’s talked to anyone in the universal teams because otherwise they’d have lots of information about all these aspects. So I think there’s still a lot of work to do in companies at corporate levels, in the corporate affairs departments, in the communication department. There’s a lot of work to do for them to understand the work that is being done on site and the sort of information that is being generated on site.

Stuart van de Water (17:51): Yeah, it’s very similar sort of perspective. And it’s funny, something like ESG, the E stands for environmental, but it’s definitely not the environmental we are talking about. It should be DE for decarbonisation. That’s pretty much all that cares about. And that’s decarbonisation is more an accounting function than anything else. It’s quite striking how it doesn’t translate.

Claire Cote (18:04): Correct. Yeah, it’s quite striking the sustainable report. They all talk about decarbonisation and only one company talks about rehabilitation. And I would’ve thought to stakeholders, they’re actually interested in how you are doing rehabilitation because that’s part of your commitment.

Stuart van de Water (18:24): Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And then like you said, that disconnect and we have been on that side of managing all of the monitoring data, the sampling, all of the real time data, but then how that connects through to the corporate reporting and just some of those isolated things that they do need. There seems to be a lot of work to do there, but how people will actually get that is a challenge.

Jaimee Nobbs (18:48): How do you see environmental data being positioned as a business asset if people aren’t registering it at the moment, if there’s comms teams and stuff that can still do work, how would you change an industry perception? I guess this is quite a big question, but how would you change an industry perception to understand that environmental performance in terms of a business asset rather than I guess just a system or just a bit of data that people are collecting?

Claire Cote (19:16): There’s a fantastic opportunity at the moment. The mining companies are working together through their industry bodies. So through ICMM, the Mining Association of Canada, the World Gold Council and Copper Mark, they are working to consolidate their standard into one standard. So everybody, you would’ve heard, there’s lots of different standards. G-R-I-C-M-M, responsible mining principles is too much and companies, it generates a lot of distractions and the supply chain actors are complaining as well. I say we don’t understand what good performance is. Good ESG performance in general because you all have different standards, it’s just too hard for us to make sense of it. So they’re constantly their standard. It is now through a first round of public consultation, he is receiving overwhelming support. So within a year or two, I’m not quite sure the timeframe, we will have a consultated mining standard and what investors or supply chain actors will expect in that the mine will have a tick that they comply with that standard and then oh, great, I can buy products from them because they’ve got that thick. So there’s a fantastic opportunity to rethink our data management system to ensure we can, mines can demonstrate compliance with those standards, which will be a fantastic business opportunity because it will receive a lot of attention, particularly from investors and purchases. So they will look at performance through that standard and that’s where data management can become a fantastic business asset.

Stuart van de Water (20:47): Yeah, we’ve seen it with some of our customers. One really large iron ore miner for example. They utilise their water data daily to make decisions on where their mining next. It’s a really dynamic environment. They treat it very importantly. But it’s like any sort of business, I guess the businesses that say, as long as we make a profit, we are happy as long as we tick the box that we are compliant with that one thing, we’re great. But the really good ones say, well, that’s good, but we want to make sure we’re also achieving growth with our profitability to make sure we’ve got a healthy business, not just now, but in the future. I think that’s changing the mindset of I’m doing compliance to prove I’m not doing anything wrong versus I’m doing it to prove that I’m actually doing some right things. So we’ve often thought about what if the system could say, instead of reporting compliance issues, what about something like a stability index?
Or to say, actually no, we’ve shown through really good environmental stewardship that we’ve stabilised these sort of factors or the impact of our mind has on the surrounding environment. And I guess that’s a win-win for the organisation. Maybe then they can lessen the amount of environmental monitoring they need to do, which can be costly. So I guess it’s people thinking of that mindset in the positive as opposed to, oh, it’s a negative thing. I’m just got to make sure I’m not doing the wrong thing and I can prove that. Then I tick and then I move on.

Claire Cote (22:08): Yeah, that’s a really good point, Stuart. We are seeing a lot more integration of environmental aspect in mind planning, for instance. So they’re starting to think, okay, well how can I do this so that water has less of an impact in my production days, this sort of aspect. So this is a big shift that we are seeing a lot more of.

Jaimee Nobbs (22:25): It’s an exciting shift. It’s great. I guess that is always going to be a challenge is when you are asking people to or asking companies to change their behaviours, not because of a regulatory standpoint, but because it’s the right thing to do. That’s easier said than done. So I can understand that being quite a big change in terms of data management and data infrastructure. How does the way you set up data impact your, say for example, water management strategies and how you report regulatory requirements?

Stuart van de Water (22:59): I guess it’s coming down to the question of how timely is your data? And I guess, so there’s a couple of things around do you have up-to-date data? But also I think the consistency in how you categorise data is really important as well because we’ve seen say from some very large operational mining companies that they could even, the way they categorise data, especially water data, say between recycled and the like, was actually different. So how do you, and rolling up to reporting, you’re going, well, how’s that even possible when there’s all these sort of different things at play? So to actually have a really thorough, and again, coming back to that word, holistic view of how these things are done at that level, how they are agreed, hopefully as that’s really good to hear, Claire, in terms of having a consistent standard that everyone can work to also helps a lot as well.
Otherwise, you do get, and it’s funny, we’ve seen from a software perspective, when people change roles and people change roles a lot, people do things differently and there’s no standard, you can actually almost not be able to report from one period to another because come in and done something completely different. So there’s that human element again that really can impact. So again, and Claire said it really well earlier, there’s so many different variables at play when it comes to managing the environment, so many different. There’s multidisciplinary, there’s so many parts of it. So you’ve got to have a think of it as a framework and then how all those things are done consistently and in I guess the timely manner of what’s appropriate. Again, we’ll have seen that sort of corporate reporting exercise that Claire mentioned, not with Anglo, but with some other people around. Oh yeah, well, we didn’t have the data, so we’re just using data from last year. Or some sort of calculated value, which may or may not be the truth or what’s actually happening, but it’s close enough. So some of those data management practises are pretty impactful.

Jaimee Nobbs (24:52): That’s pretty wild. In terms of access though, I guess maybe Claire, you’ve got some thoughts here. Who ultimately needs access to that information? When you’re talking about the new standards coming out, what teams actually need access to that information? Is it the comms team? Is it just health and safety? And in the environmental team, I guess at what point do you say across a company, what levels of access do people need for environmental data?

Claire Cote (25:25): Environmental data requires knowledge of what’s taking place and the UNRU system. So I tend to think of the enviro data management system as something the enviro teams use. Someone who’s trained in marial aspects, someone who understands the monitoring systems and why someone who’s had training, who knows how to take samples and all this of things. There’s lots of issues around collecting in marial data, the sampling schedule, all the quality assurance documentation that the system will track as well. The relationship with the laboratories, this is a lot of work and is very much the vital experts that deal with it. So I think access to un environ database is very much something for the un environ teams and different mind within the same company can have different and vital dynamic management system doesn’t all have to be the same. It can be adapted to the specific context at the mine, but then that data management, that environ data management system needs to have customised reports of ways to communicate information that is relevant to the other parts of the company.

So the first level up will be safety health environments. A lot of companies organise themselves like this where they put safety, health and environment in the same bucket and they will have similar reporting requirements time. So then there needs to be an interaction with this and that can be done reasonably easily with customised reports really, and you just condense the data in a way that makes sense to that level. And then you could have similar type of customised reports to regulators, to corporate affairs, et cetera. But I still think the environmental data management should be within the VARs who know what they are doing. I’m not sure whether you’ve seen anything else to it in terms of access.

Stuart van de Water (27:10): Yeah, it seems to be pretty prevalent these days. Like you said, it’s having those different views of who needs to have a look at the data. We often start there to say, what are the outcomes we need to be measuring here? So all of the different drivers and stakeholders involved, and part of that kickoff is to what integrations do we need? You mentioned the relationships with the labs, so hugely important. And generally the labs are really motivated to get it right because any friction at their end, at their scale causes a lot of chaos too. We know how that can cause chaos at site as well. So a lot of what we do is almost bringing some of these parties together to go, alright, it’s clear you’re probably not talking, or we haven’t really worked out how to best do this. And sometimes we’ve even had an example recently where we had a customer that was vendor was providing 8,000 files a day for data management, and we are like, have you ever asked this vendor to maybe not give you 8,000 and consolidate that down a little bit because Oh no, we just went along with it.
So it’s about the people who are using the data and stuff, they don’t ask enough questions or try to, we have cut that down to 2000, which is still a lot, but it’s heading in the right direction because then we were looking at the downstream effects so that it can cause delays in processing and those sort of things, but then making sure that everything coming in is usable. And also clearly you mentioned the customizable extracts and where that data’s coming from. Also really important to know that I’m looking at a value of where did it come from. So that traceability is super important too. So there always has to sort of be this base foundation of, yeah, we can put everything in there because we know what we need to answer now, but if one of these new frameworks comes out and it needs to answer something we didn’t know, then we’ve got to make sure we’ve got the best chance of having that already.
Otherwise we’re scampering around trying to collect this sort of thing. So talking about a data management system or that thing that you build, you need to make sure that there’s, as we like to say, Jaimee, no data left behind. It needs to be able to have everything in there that’s relevant for what we are managing so that if we need to use it in certain ways in the future, we can do that. Because as the sort of research that Claire’s doing and some of these standards coming in might come up and going, oh, we’ve just cracked the Da Vinci code of environmental performance and it’s this plus that minus this. And if you don’t have those things, then you’re going to be skipping around. But if you’ve got all that data, you go, oh, cool, we can apply that and out she goes. So it’s like I said, we do start with the outputs, but sometimes you need to be thinking that’s cool, but what else is, is there, let’s get those almost like that, what we call the value chains of data so that it comes from the field through the lab into a system, and then we know how we could then utilise that sort of thing as well.

Jaimee Nobbs (29:51): Yeah, it’s so important having that, the way of talking between the systems, being able to trace the data throughout the business as well. You’ve touched on a few interesting points there about what sort of frameworks we may see in the future. That does lead nicely into our last question. So looking ahead, what innovations or frameworks do you see shaping the future of environmental performance in the mining and resources sector over the next, say five to 10 years?

Claire Cote (30:17): So I would just mention first it is great to have a system to manage your data, but you actually need to analyse this as well. So the biggest gap we see, they collect data. Some of them have good system to collect the data and manage it in a proper system, but then they don’t really analyse it. And really your data should be continuously reviewed to say, well, does it make sense to steal monitor here? And we’re talking about integration with the mine plants. That’s a perfect example. If you have a monitoring board set up and it’s been mined through, you can remove it from your monitoring network. You don’t need to keep it there. We are doing a lot of work assisting mines, for instance, reviewing their groundwater monitoring network because they haven’t done it and then realise they’ve got lots of wars and they’re not useful anymore because the mine has evolved, et cetera. So there needs to be greater focus on data analysis and using that analysis to review your monitoring requirements and continuously improve them. So I see this as a gap more than an innovation. And I know requires invested in data analysis functionalities, which is great because the environmental personnel on the mine site, they’re not very good coders, usually. They just have Excel and as you know, you can’t do proper data analysis with the amount of data they collect. It’s not going to get done in Excel. So
I think there needs to be innovation definitely on the analysis side and how to support that continuous improvement of monitoring network.

Stuart van de Water (31:43): Yeah, I think that’s a really good point. Our biggest challenge is often just getting people to put stuff in a database and we are trying to take them from spreadsheets into the new age of having a system, which again, you might think this is just a small mining company’s issue, but some pretty large surprising companies just don’t have this infrastructure where if they’ve got a system that’s been built internally and it’s pretty clunky to sort of go back to talking about in terms of the scheduling side of it, almost that orchestra of how things are working together and coming out. If you don’t get all that right, you can’t even think about doing the analysis. But we do find a lot more these days that companies are more interested in having that analysis, but also integrating with their business intelligence platforms, their clouds, their lakes, and all of those sort of things, which is really good because we’re seeing some really impressive, say, power BI reports. We’re actually working with a couple of companies now that specialise in environmental performance dashboards.
So there’s one in particular in New South Wales at the moment who have engaged somebody to give them a really good view of that. And that comes to exactly what you’re talking about, Claire. It’s the sort of analysis and performance of what’s happening, the effects of those things, and what can you do to optimise these sort of things as well. And I guess take advantage of it. That’s what will actually prick the interest of these large companies is go, by the way, there’s a lot in it for you. If you can get this right, you can save money, you can optimise costs, you can, all of those sort of things speak their language. And by the way, we are doing really good things to the environment. That’s really cool too. So yeah, a lot of things at play there. And we also see things like a lot of low cost devices, lower orbit satellites, those sort of things, trying to get data in more real time, and I guess that backs up not really useful if you can’t do anything with it at the other end.
So that analysis piece. So if you’ve got that in place, the more data we can get, the more we can get that in time, the more granular we can make it to help, I guess, optimise that model, the better. So hopefully those sort of things will come in. But again, if you’re just doing it for the sake of doing it, you’ve got all this wasted energy and probably cost to go. We’re not really doing much of it. So I think it has to be led with that analysis, thinking, the performance thinking that Claire’s looking at and then working out, okay, well how do we then feed the beast?

Jaimee Nobbs (34:01): So you can have all the innovation and all the technological advancements in the world, but if you’re not analysing it, there’s no point.

Claire Cote (34:07): Yeah, that’s right.

Jaimee Nobbs (34:07): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s a really good place to leave it. We’ve covered a lot of ground there. If people want to learn more about the research that you’re doing, Claire, where can they go?

Claire Cote (34:20): Oh, websites, email. Yeah, email’s the best. Really.

Jaimee Nobbs (34:27): Okay. You can drop that into the, yeah, just,

Claire Cote (34:30): Yeah, that’s right. Yeah.

Jaimee Nobbs (34:31): Great. Thank you both so much.

Stuart van de Water (34:34): Thanks, Jaimee.

Jaimee Nobbs (34:35): No, thank you very much. Thanks for listening to this episode of Acquire Connected. If you found this episode valuable and we hope you did, don’t forget to click subscribe so you never miss a conversation. We’d love to hear your feedback too. So please leave us a rating, review and share this episode with a colleague or friend who you think might find it interesting. That’s all from us. We’ll see you next week.