Critical drivers and considerations in designing open pits and landforms: decisions engineers and planners make and why

Authors: Lacy, HWB; Russell, M; Slight, MG Download Paper Open access courtesy of:

DOI https://doi.org/10.36487/ACG_repo/2515_50

Cite As:
Lacy, HWB, Russell, M & Slight, MG 2025, 'Critical drivers and considerations in designing open pits and landforms: decisions engineers and planners make and why ', in S Knutsson, AB Fourie & M Tibbett (eds), Mine Closure 2025: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Mine Closure, Australian Centre for Geomechanics, Perth, pp. 1-15, https://doi.org/10.36487/ACG_repo/2515_50



Abstract:
Do mine closure professionals truly understand the design decisions of mining engineers and planners in open pit mining and waste landform design? Using our combined experience, we unpack, investigate and discuss the primary and secondary drivers in these decision-making practices and the value chain process used in mine development and discuss the discovery of a highly influential and persistent paradox. Waste landforms are among the largest structures at a mine. Poorly designed and constructed waste landforms can become a significant long-term closure liability. Closure professionals are often faced with attempting to rehabilitate poorly planned and/or constructed landforms, which leaves a negative legacy, elevated environmental and business risk, long-term management costs and challenges for regulators, mining companies and the community – a recurring situation extant across mine sites globally, and that we believe is primarily due to the ways mines come into being and are designed primarily on economics. This is a situation we describe as the ‘value chain paradox’. Mining engineers in training today often become the mine planners, senior operational engineers, general managers and chief executive officers of the future. Is training today optimising practice and design toward a positive mine closure legacy? Our review suggests that more integrated team decisions in mine planning, awareness, capacity building and education will be the solution to the paradox, and hence we discuss resolutions in detail. A further aim of this research was to provide closure practitioners, regulators, and stakeholders greater understanding of the constraints and drivers mining engineers and planners must consider in mine and landform design. In this paper, we advise closure practitioners of the linkages between the pit waste and landform construction, throughout mine life to closure, as we believe that in seeking to understand, practitioners gain the capacity to influence the designs and construction of the mine and ultimately to make the change toward a more sustainable post-mining state, returning disturbed land to a stable and productive condition and leaving a positive legacy.

Keywords: economics, geotechnical, landform construction, mine engineer, training, value chain process, value chain paradox.

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