The NSW Minerals Council will hold their annual Health, Safety, Environment and Community Awards during the HSEC Conference in August, with the four categories set to be contested by some of the best in the business.
Yancoal is nominated in the Health Excellence category for a Mental Health Program they are halfway through rolling out across their workforce. It’s a four-stage four-year structured and resourced program that Yancoal said has already made a difference.
Yancoal said they used it to promote positive mental health management and ‘help-seeking’ behaviours among the workforce, changing perceptions of mental health and equipping people to better support their teams, co-workers, family and friends.
Peabody is also nominated for the ‘Spring Panther’, a low-cost, high-return initiative combining a spring balancer with a lightweight monorail system to eliminate substantial manual handling risks from using hand bolters.
Before the Spring Panther, the workforce manually operated heavy hand bolters to carry out highly repetitive daily tasks. Since implementing the new tools, Peabody has seen a positive boost to production, reduced long-term injuries and lost labour.
Centennial and the Newcastle Coal Infrastructure Group (NCIG) are going head-to-head in the Safety Excellence category.
Centennial’s ‘Fatal Risk Program’ was established to better prevent major accidents, fatalities and life-changing injuries by building internal capability to effectively control fatal risks.
It was a program put together over an extended period with Centennial undertaking a Fatal Risk Management assessment to give priority treatment to their identified Fatal Risks. After that, they undertook a 24-month process to develop controls and implement them across the business.
NCIG developed a Safety Culture Score to help their safety culture on site. It integrates lead safety indicators across Environment, Practices, People and Leadership.
NCIG said the introduction of SCS has yielded tangible benefits, notably a 10% increase in SCS over the FY21-23 period correlates with a reduction of 34% in total incidents and 50% in recorded injuries.
Peabody is the only company up for Environmental Excellence for their work to protect two threatened species of microbats at their Wilpinjong mine.
Three businesses are up for the Community Excellence Award including Dreampath for their recruitment program. They identified a major barrier to indigenous people entering mining, that being a lack of appropriate pre-employment training.
Dreampath is an immersive pre-employment experience combining advanced simulator training with classroom theory, practical demonstrations and life skills.
Evolution Mining’s ‘Frontline Services Ball’ is also nominated.
Lastly, Idemitsu is a finalist in this category for the Boggabri Community Early Learning Facility. In consultation with the community and stakeholders, they found there was a need for more childcare centres for the Boggabri township.
It has been successfully operating since 2021 supporting mining and non-mining families.
NSW Mining Director of Public Affairs Scott Kennan said the awards shine a light on the efforts of the companies and the amazing people working in them.
“And we want to recognise them because there is so much good work led by smart people happening all the time. Often, it can be thought of as just getting the job done. But the reality is that they are improving the way they work incrementally every day and that’s something worth celebrating.”
