At 3:30pm on November 5, 2015, a tailings dam near Mariana, Minas Gerais, Brazil began to leak. The Fundão Dam, operated by Samarco and built to store waste from the Germano iron ore mine, sat in the hills above the village of Bento Rodrigues. By 4:20pm, the leak had become a catastrophic rupture.
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An estimated 43.7 million cubic metres of mine tailings surged into the Doce River. The toxic sludge engulfed Bento Rodrigues and Paracatu de Baixo, killing 19 people, displacing thousands, and contaminating hundreds of kilometres of waterways before reaching the Atlantic Ocean. It remains Brazil’s worst environmental disaster. The social, environmental, and economic impacts are still being felt and will likely persist for generations.
Four years later, the Brumadinho tailings dam disaster, also in Brazil, caused by the sudden collapse of an iron ore waste dam, killed 270 people. At precisely the moment when minerals were becoming central to the global energy transition, mining found itself in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons.
The industry response was significant.
In 2020, the Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management (GISTM) was launched by the International Council on Mining and Metals, the United Nations Environment Programme, and the Principles for Responsible Investment. It introduced a globally recognised framework built on zero harm, board-level accountability, independent oversight, transparent disclosure, and planning for worst-case failure scenarios.
Alongside this, the Mining Association of Canada’s Towards Sustainable Mining (TSM) standard has also become a widely adopted industry framework over the last 20 years, focusing on continuous performance improvement across environmental and social responsibility, including tailings management, community engagement, and site-level accountability.
Across the sector, leadership teams have started to rethink and reshape their relationship with the land, communities, investors, and employees.
But standards and frameworks alone do not create responsible mining. People do.
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