Abstract
South Africa is a mining powerhouse in Africa and it is the largest producer of platinum in the world. Historically, the overall safety performances of the mining sector were very high compared to the fatality rates of Australia, the USA and Canada. To address this, during the Mine Health and Safety Summit in 2003, the tripartite institutions, namely, Mine Health and Safety Council, various mining committees’ representatives and the Mining Qualification Authority (MQA) agreed that the South African safety statistics become comparable with their international counterparts. Working towards zero harm was the milestone that was agreed on and the period to reach this milestone was 2013. This required South Africa’s safety statistics to decline by 20% each year. This paper focuses on the South African platinum sector by comparing the overall safety performances of companies and identifies the potential sources of best practices in the platinum industry.
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Genc, B., Mlangena, T., Onifade, M. (2019). Safety Towards Zero Harm in the South African Platinum Sector. In: Widzyk-Capehart, E., Hekmat, A., Singhal, R. (eds) Proceedings of the 27th International Symposium on Mine Planning and Equipment Selection - MPES 2018. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99220-4_45
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