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Lovemore Zigara Business Correspondent
PLATINUM miner Mimosa Mining Company has announced plans to recycle 20 million tonnes of waste at the mine dumps to recover platinum which could be reclaimed during processing. The mine’s resident director, Peter Chimbodza, could not give a time frame on when the Zvishavane-based mine will undertake the process but said the advent of new technology had made it possible to recover platinum from dumps.

“We’re not recovering all the platinum during processing so, we’ve our losses just like in the stamp mills in the gold sector where about 60 percent of gold is recovered with the remainder going to dumps.

“With changes in technology we can process these dumps. We’ve plans to reprocess the 20 million tonnes of dumps we have. We know what we can get from these dumps because we have an idea of what has gone there.”

The move by Mimosa, a joint venture between Implats and Aquarius, comes after the Chamber of Mines recently announced that the platinum sector was under pressure due to the plummeting global metal price and an increase in production costs. Mimosa has since embarked on cost-cutting measures which resulted in just over 100 workers going on voluntary retrenchment in May last year as the giant miner seeks to streamline operations.

Meanwhile, the company executive chairman, Winston Chitando, said discussions between platinum producers and the government to set up a platinum refinery were at an advanced stage.

“There’re some plans being discussed with the government that I think I wouldn’t be privy to talk about at the moment.

But what I want to emphasise is that the discussions are positive.”

Recently, government ordered the platinum miners to set up refineries to curb exporting raw platinum and encourage beneficiation.

Value addition and beneficiation is one of the clusters identified in the Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-economic Transformation, an economic blueprint to spearhead economic revival to 2018.