Strategy and Sustainable Development

Key Sustainability Opportunities

In addition to assessing the key sustainability challenges and risks facing Xstrata, our businesses also consider opportunities to create value for shareholders and make a positive contribution to sustainable development. These include:

  • Improving energy and resource efficiency at our operations to optimise the use of resources in providing society’s basic materials
  • Recycling base and precious metals, through our dedicated facilities in Canada, the US and Asia. This ensures that natural resources are efficiently used and reused, prolonging their life cycle, recouping additional value and reducing waste. An expansion of the plant is also under way at Sudbury Smelter, Canada
  • Developing and marketing proprietary technologies to increase the efficiency of metals and mining operations, through:
  • Xstrata Technology’s smelting, refining, grinding and processing products, many of which are industry leaders, are marketed to metals and mining companies globally, including Xstrata’s own operations
  • Xstrata Process Support develops processing solutions for Xstrata’s operations to improve efficiency and solve processing bottlenecks
  • Proprietary technological solutions are developed by Xstrata’s commodity businesses to improve efficiency. An example is the Premus technology developed by Xstrata Alloys to reduce the energy intensity of ferrochrome production, currently in use at Xstrata’s Lion Ferrochrome and Lydenburg plants in South Africa
  • Contributing financially and advocating wider industry and governmental support for the development and implementation of clean coal technologies, to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from using coal as a source of energy, enabling coal to continue to fuel economic and social development in a carbon-constrained world
  • Identifying market opportunities for our products or by-products arising from advances or trends in sustainable development, for example the potential market for vanadium for use in redox batteries used in wind turbines, the use of coal-seam methane to generate electricity, or the use of nickel in flue gas desulphurisation scrubbers in coal-fired power plants.
Xstrata Nickel’s Falcondo operation supports local farmers to grow crops and preserve forest through the Falcondo Foundation, Dominican Republic

Xstrata Nickel’s Falcondo operation supports local farmers to grow crops and preserve forest through the Falcondo Foundation, Dominican Republic