Every Friday, SAfm’s radio anchor Sakina Kamwendo speaks to Martin Creamer, publishing editor of Engineering News & Mining Weekly. Reported here is this Friday’s At the Coalface transcript:
Kamwendo: South Africa’s DRDGOLD is spending R10-billion on five new gold-from-waste projects.
Creamer: This is music to the ears. We need a lot of investment of this nature. The private sector is doing it and particularly in gold. Implementing this capital expenditure is South Africa's DRDGOLD, which is the longest-listed company on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. It has been listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange for 131 years. Now, what they are doing is not digging holes anymore and sinking shafts.
They go along to those mine dumps, they go along to the tailings dams, the slimes dams and they apply a technology where they can extract the gold from that. They are going to do this across a big area in South Africa at the moment because, out on the East Rand they have got Ergo. There are going to be several projects there. Then on the Far West Rand, beyond the Westonaria and Carletonville areas, they are going to do something even bigger. So, this involves recovering gold and then restoring the environment. It is very important that the environment is also restored because these dumps have been left behind. You don't want to have them there forever. DRDGOLD is recovering the gold at a time when the gold price is good, so you can really extract it. They’ve got an abundance of waste material to retreat, environment to restore, so it’s a really nice win-win situation.
