Establishing a tailings storage facility database in Gauteng

• This study suggests the establishment of a tailings storage facility database in Gauteng, South Africa. • It calls for the involvement of stakeholders (i.e. government, mine management, holders of prospecting or mining rights, mine employees, shareholders, regulators, and the affected communities), to collectively manage TSFs. • The research highlights the importance of creating a live database to compile all pertinent information and the status of each Tailings Storage Facility (TSF). • The study discusses the benefits of a TSF database such as showing a spatial distribution of active and dormant TSFs and their ownership in Gauteng. • 94 TSFs could be spatially presented in ArcGIS Pro owing to missing coordinate data, the actual number from the source data is 329. • DRD gold has the most TSFs in Gauteng, followed by AfriSam, mogale gold and blyvoor Gold. There is an almost an equal split between active and dormant TSFs. As an initial step of zero harm, an understanding of the scale and magnitude of Tailings Storage Facilities (TSFs) is necessary for risk assessments. There is no publicly available TSF database in each South African province with details on TSF distribution of risks and characteristics. TSF-related cases such as the Jagersfontein Tailings Dam failure and the crime challenges by illegal miners at the North Sands Dump are significant motivations to establish a publicly accessible TSF database, especially in Gauteng. The objectives of the study were to establish a TSF database comprising the spatial distribution of TSFs and to classify each TSF by its operational activity status. The Department of Mineral Resources and Energy publishes data on TSFs, and it was used to create the database. Due to coordinate data limitations, only 94 TSFs could be presented on ArcGIS Pro. The study finds that there is almost an equal split of active and inactive TSFs in Gauteng. Most active TSFs are situated in the East Rand of Gauteng. Furthermore, companies that own some of the TSFs in Gauteng include Durban Roodepoort Deep Gold, which owns 70 % of TSFs, followed by AfriSam (6 %) and Blyvoor Gold (4 %). Companies need to disclose all their TSF data to strengthen the database.