NSW Mining’s 2024 HSEC awards winners
NSW Mineral Council’s HSEC awards winners were announced last night as part of the organisation’s annual Health, Safety, Environment and Community Conference being held in Hunter this week.
The awards recognise and celebrate the most outstanding innovations and contributions to the mining industry across a range of categories.
NSW Minerals Council chief executive Stephen Galilee says the awards highlight the industry’s ongoing efforts to deliver better outcomes for the State’s workforce, communities and the environment.
“The drive to innovate and develop world-leading practices is part of the NSW mining industry’s commitment to mine responsibility now and in the future,” he said.
“Our 2024 award entrants have continued a very high standard”.
The Health Excellence Award went to Peabody, 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.
The Safety Excellence Award went to Newcastle Coal Infrastructure Group (NCIG) for overcoming the challenge of effectively measuring safety performance due to limitations in traditional lag indicators, through the development of the Safety Culture Score (SCS) which integrates lead safety indicators across environment, practices, people and leadership.
Tangible benefits include a 10% increase in SCS over the FY21-FY23 period, correlating with a reduction of 34% in total incidents and 50% in recorded injuries.
The Environmental Excellence Award went to Peabody, Wilpinjong mine, for its restoration of a mine adit for an endangered species of microbat.
The Community Excellence Award went to Dreampath Recruitment for its work in pre-employment training for Indigenous people, through its signature program that combines advanced simulator training with classroom theory, practical demonstrations and life skills coaching.
The program has resulted in half of its 50 candidates securing a CERT III Surface Extraction Traineeship.
Other winners of the awards include:
Health Excellence Award: Yancoal, Mental Health Program, for reducing psychosocial stressors on their workforce and decreasing the Total Recordable Injury Frequency Rate, significant incidents and days lost to workplace injuries.
Safety Excellence Award: Centennial, Fatal Risk Program, for its fatal risk management assessment, followed by 24 months of developing and implementing controls through a custom-made software and dashboards that can function in underground environments and be adapted to other industries.
Community Excellence Award: Evolution Mining’s Northparkes operations, Front Services Ball, for raising $170,000 for local charities including mental health programs, emergency equipment such as defibrillators and upgrades to local PCYC facilities.
Community Excellence Award: Idemitsu’s Boggabri coal mine for providing the land, funding, developing the Boggabri Community Early Learning Facility and underwriting the business case, thereby supporting the region’s mining and non-mining families since 2021.