Replicate Pickstone’s sustainable mining – Kambamura
The Deputy Minister of Mines and Mining Development Engineer Polite Kambamura has urged the mining industry to mine sustainably drawing lessons from previous owners of the Pickstone Peerless Mine in Chegutu where Operations were able to be resumed despite the mine having been shut down due to low grades then.
Rudairo Mapuranga
Speaking to Mining Zimbabwe on the sidelines of a Ministerial visit to the Pickstone Peerless underground project, Kambamura encouraged miners to mine sustainably to enable future generations to benefit.
“The old miners mined this mine sustainably that is why the current investor was able to resuscitate this mine because it was mined in a sustainable manner.
“So we urge other miners to mine sustainably so that the future generation can also benefit. In the future a grade of 0.5 grams per tonne might also be sustainable,” Dr Kambamura said.
The Deputy Minister also commended Dallaglio for reopening closed Mines which echoes President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s vision for the country to become an upper middle-income economy by 2030.
“This is a high-grade low volume as compared to Eureka which is a low-grade high volume. 2030 vision is built by contributions from different sectors of the economy, in this sector its all about opening new and old Mines through intensive exploration. So what Pickstone and Peerless have done is to reopen this mine which was closed. It was closed long back because it had low grades which are basically high grades in this era,” Engineer Polite Kambamura said.
Speaking to Mining Zimbabwe Pickstone Peerless General Manager Engineer Alfred Madowe said the development of Pickstone underground operation has created 550 new jobs.
He said the mine was still running its open pit and intending to close early next year but one of the pits will continue to end of next year to support the underground operations with an Outlook to produce an average 100 kgs a month.
The Mine according to Engineer Madowe, Pickstone will next year expand its CIL plant to help the mine process 42 000 tonnes a month.
“This operation is now employing about 550 people. We are still running the open pit, we are closing one of the pits early next year but one of the pits is continuing hopefully to the end of next year basically to support underground as we are ramping up underground production. We also want to ramp up the tonnes we are processing, in terms of outlook we would want to get to about 100 kgs a month. From June next year we would have expanded our CIL plant. At the moment we have extended an additional mill so we now have 4 mills capable of doing 42 000 tonnes but we can’t do 42 000 because of the limitation on our tanks but after expanding on our tanks we can now go to 42000 tonnes per month,” Engineer Madowe said.