The 2024 New South Wales Minerals Council’s Health, Safety, Environment, and Community (HSEC) Awards winners have been announced at the annual HSEC Conference.
The prestigious annual awards celebrate the most outstanding innovations and contributions to the mining industry across a range of categories: Health Excellence, Safety Excellence, Environmental Excellence, and Community Excellence.
Health Excellence Award
The 2024 Health Excellence Award was awarded to Peabody’s Metropolitan Mine, for its Spring Panther initiative – a low-cost engineering innovation that combines a spring balancer with a lightweight monorail system to eliminate substantial manual handling risks from using hand bolters.
Previously, the workforce at Metropolitan Mine manually operated heavy hand bolters to carry out highly repetitive daily tasks, leading to increased muscle tension and related medical issues. The Spring Panther protects workers from acute and chronic injuries and has also boosted production.
Safety Excellence Award
The Safety Excellence Award was presented to Newcastle Coal Infrastructure Group (NCIG) for successfully tackling the challenge of measuring safety performance due to the limitations of traditional lag indicators.
NCIG developed the Safety Culture Score (SCS), which integrates lead safety indicators across four key dimensions: environment, practices, people, and leadership.
The introduction of SCS has yielded tangible benefits, notably a ten per cent increase in SCS over the FY21-23 period, correlating with a reduction of 34 per cent in total incidents and 50 per cent in recorded injuries.
Environmental Excellence Award
Peabody, Wilpinjong Mine, won the Environmental Excellence Award for its restoration of a mine adit for an endangered species of microbat. During an environmental assessment at the Wilpinjong Mine, a historical oil shale mine adit – the old horizontal passage to the legacy mine – was discovered within the proposed extension area and found to be home to two threatened species of microbats.
With the planned extension work potentially impacting the adit’s old wooden structure and microbat habitat, the mine’s environmental department collaborated with a bat specialist to design an innovative adit support to protect the microbat colony.
Community Excellence Award
Dreampath Recruitment won the Community Excellence Award for its work in pre-employment training for Indigenous people. Dreampath Recruitment consulted with community leaders, industry partners and regulatory bodies to design the Dreampath program, an immersive pre-employment experience that combines advanced simulator training with classroom theory, practical demonstrations and life skills coaching.
To date, the program has resulted in 25 of 50 candidates securing a CERT III Surface Extraction Traineeship.
New South Wales Minerals Council CEO, Stephen Galilee, said, “Our HSEC Awards are an important part of the conference as they highlight our industry’s ongoing efforts to deliver better outcomes for our workforce, our communities, and the environment.
“The drive to innovate and develop world-leading practices is part of the New South Wales mining industry’s commitment to mine responsibility now and in the future.”
“Our 2024 award entrants have continued a very high standard, demonstrating our industry’s commitment to improving how we operate. Congratulations to all our winners and finalists,” Mr Galilee said.
Featured image: Prarinya/shutterstock.com
