Health and Safety

Recognizing the inherent hazards in the mining industry, we uphold employees’ health and safety to the highest priority. In order to ensure the occupational safety and health of our employees, we strengthen safety management to reduce and eliminate accidents, enhance property security and avoid occupational diseases based on comprehensive personnel safety and health management policies.

Community Engagement

In pursuit of building a good relationship between the Group and the local community for a win-win situation, we make every effort to create a green and harmonious environment to drive the region’s environmental, social and economic development simultaneously. In the recent several years, the Group has performed the following jobs:

Caring about and supporting public education, we donated over RMB 121,000 to the public education development within Yangzhuang Iron Mine’s neighboring community – Yishui County, including construction of several community colleges.

400 employment opportunities were afforded to residents in nearby community in recent years. Among these employment positions, around 160 for Qinjiazhuang, 50 for Shuiniu, 38 for Gongdan Mountain, and 120 for other villages were offered – priority is given to residents of nearby communities in our development.

To develop a sustainable environment, we invested over RMB 120,000 in environmental management of neighboring communities. We not only take comprehensive utilization of our by-products to mining reclamation and provide self planted fruits and vegetables to villagers for free, but we also invested in greening barren mountains, greening villages and providing haze disaster relief, etc.

For poverty relief and charities, we invested over RMB 263,500, including relieving the lonely elderly of no family and constructing community facilities.

To further contribute to society, benefits community and improve the Group’s image, we sponsored community activities for over RMB 700,000 and also positively participated in them.

Water Resources Management

Zero sewage discharge as a very firm step towards a genuinely green mine, truly reflects our fundamental principle of “Reduce and Reuse Water”. Here we specified zero sewage discharge in processing activities and municipal sewage, which were collected and directed to our tailing dry discharge system and municipal sewage treatment facilities respectively.

Energy and Mineral Resources

Mutual balance between energy use and climate change is crucial for our long-term sustainability. We made every endeavor to improve our resource and energy utilization rate, thereby contribute in slowing down the pace of climate change.

Resources Utilization: We apply short-hole shrinkage mining and sublevel room mining to increase our resource utilization rate – mining recovery rate was increased thereby maximizing utilization of measured iron ore resources and extending the mine’s service life.

Energy Utilization: We understand that corporate reduction in Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can have a major influence on combating global warming and climate change. Therefore we are dedicated to decrease our own GHG emissions, as well as encouraging our stakeholders to do so. Measures we took to reduce GHG emissions are as follow.

We conducted preliminary iron ore selection at mining process – by taking out part of waste rocks, the ore quantity needed for grinding has decreased significantly. This achievement helps to cut down our cost on energy usage and electricity, reduce direct Greenhouse gas emission and air pollutants.

We used more crushing and less grinding procedures in iron ore processing. This approach helps to reduce electricity consumption and respective GHG emissions for achieving specified iron ore granularity. It also helps to enhance the efficiency of magnetic separation to improve product quality.

Being one of the State Green Mine in China, large quantities of selected flora are planted within site boundary. This laid the foundation in conducting carbon removal to offset our GHG emissions. For details of afforestation, please refer to the “Biodiversity and Land Use” section.

Biodiversity and Land Use

The nature of our business principally has impact on local physical environmental, which in turn has influence on its biotic environment. Without a proper management system, the ecosystem may encounter an imbalance, culminating in irreversible environmental impact. Thus, we put emphasis on the protection of our lands and biodiversity through prevention, control, mitigation and compensation. In recent years, we invested over RMB 52 millions in natural resources preservation (water source, mineral sources, etc.) and ecological construction.

• 100% greening of afforestation area;
• 100% recycling water for operation afforded by our patented tailing sand dry discharge system in this reporting year;
• high ore dressing recovering rate, improving mineral resource utilization rate;
• Over 200,000 trees and other plants were planted on our own initiative;
• Geographical remediation and afforestation to Gong Dan Mountain, including 9,500 m2 slope surface arrangement, 1,280 meters mine cracks control, 15,425 m3 blasting perilous rocks, 3,900 m3 earthwork backfilling, and afforestation including 10,479 m2 grassing, etc;
• Landscapes of mining areas on both visual sides of highways were comprehensively afforested.

For open-pit mining environment and tailing dams which were adopted before the establishment of the company, we applied afforestation to outdoor mining area; and slope cutting, broadening, strengthening, and afforestation of tailing dams to minimize potential dam break concerns. All our achievements were witnessed by government and community, and we eventually became one of first mining companies being certified as “State Green Mine” by Ministry of Land and Resources and China Mining Association.