The effectiveness of the environmental management programme as a management tool for coal mining within the Mpumalanga Province

Abstract

The EMP as an environmental management and regulatory tool are being utilized by the Department of Minerals and Energy through the requirements of the Minerals Act, 1991. The Aide-Memoire is a practical guideline document that intends to assist and guide entrepreneurs and mine owners to compile environmental management programmes. In order to complete the command and control loop, appropriate monitoring and auditing requirements had to be developed. The monitoring and auditing requirements should cater for the appropriate and specific requirements of the mining industry. The focus of EMP performance assessment and monitoring should strive towards the following two main objectives: compliance with the EMP as well as testing the appropriateness and effectiveness of the EMP. The aim of this paper is to prove that environmental compliance auditing can be used as a management tool in order to test the effectiveness of the EMP; to develop a user-friendly checklist to be used for EMP compliance auditing and to prove that the EMP as management tool can be implemented effectively for ten coal mines in the Mpumalanga Region. The audits was conducted and started of with an opening meeting, a walk of the site to record findings, a closing meeting took place, the audit findings was analyzed and an audit report for each mine was produced. To conclude, it was found that the environmental compliance audit procedure could be used successfully for EMP performance assessment. A user-friendly checklist was developed and used very successfully in the EMP performance assessment procedure. The result of the study proved that the coalmines in Mpumalanga do implement the EMP effectively as an environmental management tool.