Gaborone: The De Beers Group of Companies which released its Report to Society 2016 appropriately titled “Building Forever”, outlined the main pillars upon which its edifice is constructed.
“Today, more than ever, every business is expected to ‘do the right thing’. It is part of being a good corporate citizen,” De Beers says at the beginning of its report.
The Company enumerates three main reasons why this has been a long-ingrained guiding principle for it. These can be summed up as: all working partnerships are characterised by mutual interests – access to natural resources on the one hand and economic progress and peoples’ welfare on the other; the wellbeing and prosperity of these partners – typically diamond-resource rich countries – ensures a better investment climate and all that it implies; and finally consumer trust in diamonds from De Beers, for, as the Company stresses“ consumer demand is our primary source of value”.
The Company sums up saying: “We must therefore work to maintain the support of our partners, to be in a position to help them prosper and to ensure our customers and consumers are proud of their diamonds. That means doing everything we can to make certain that all our activities leave a lasting, positive legacy. We call this ‘Building Forever’.”
The Company says it has increased returns to governments, communities, supply chain partners and its joint venture partners by 26 per cent to US$ 5 billion in 2016. “The increase, delivered through taxes, payments for goods and services and dividends, reflects De Beers Group’s improved financial and operating performance in a year that it signed a milestone sales agreement with its Government partner in Namibia and opened the Gahcho Kué diamond mine in Canada,” the Company states.
De Beers Group’s beneficiation sales – which “generated further socio-economic benefit for its partners” – were to the tune of US$ 1.4 billion worth of rough diamonds to local cutting and polishing businesses within its producer countries. This amounts to more than 70 per cent increase over 2015.
Further, goods and services amounting to over US$ 1 billion were sourced from producer countries “ensuring greater value was realised across domestic supply chains”, De Beers says. This figure for 2016, marked a three per cent increase over the previous year.
The Report also states that De Beers supported more than 640 jobs and 120 businesses through enterprise development projects in southern Africa; managed 164,000 hectares of land for conservation – an area five times the size of that affected by the company’s mining activities; launched Diamox, Element Six’s industrial wastewater treatment system that purifies highly contaminated water using synthetic diamond material; invested a further US$ 5 million in the International Institute of Diamond Grading & Research’s testing and grading facility in Surat, India, helping to reinforce consumer confidence.
“Last year our partnerships delivered significant value for the countries in which we operate,” said Bruce Cleaver, CEO, De Beers Group. “Through our US$ 1 billion investment in local goods and services, we helped put local supply chains to work, sustaining jobs and encouraging socio-economic development. As the world’s leading diamond company, we have a responsibility to the people in the countries we operate in to ensure the value of what we mine below ground is realised at a local level above ground.”
He concluded: “Diamonds are a finite and precious resource, so it remains our responsibility to mine them safely and sustainably, and always while focusing on delivering real benefits for our partners in our operating countries that will be realised long after our last mine closes.
In its Report, De Beers highlighted its research undertaken over last year on a project “to investigate the potential of carbon-neutral mining through storing large volumes of carbon in kimberlite tailings, the rock material left over after diamonds are mined”.
De Beers hopes to implement carbon-neutral mining at some of its operations “in as few as five years”.
The research is being conducted by scientists from the Company working in close collaboration with a team of internationally-renowned scientists. The direction of the research is “to assess the carbonation potential of kimberlite, a rare type of rock that has been found to offer ideal properties for storing carbon through mineral carbonation technologies”.
The Company explained: “The project aims to accelerate what is already a naturally occurring and safe process of extracting carbon from the atmosphere and storing it at a speed that could offset man-made carbon emissions. Scientists estimate that the carbon storage potential of kimberlite tailings produced by a diamond mine every year could offset up to 10 times the emissions of a typical mine.”
De Beers Group’s Project Lead for the initiative, Dr Evelyn Mervine, said, “This project offers huge potential to completely offset the carbon emissions of De Beers’ diamond mining operations.”
Cleaver commented, “By replicating this technology at other mining operations around the world, this project could play a major role in changing the way not only the diamond industry, but also the broader mining industry, addresses the challenge of reducing its carbon footprint.
