Sustainable Mining NamDeb, NAMIBIA- Conventional Open Pit Mining versus Concurrent Open Pit Mining

Concurrent mining describes backfilling one zone while depleting subsequent zones for production purpose. This leads to the following challenges.

• If the Bedrock cleaning process is delayed then backfilling will be halted
• A shortage of haul trucks, means priority is to feed the process plant, this results in the concurrent cycle being interrupted,
• When the process plant is unavailable you have to stockpile material, and the concurrent cycle is interrupted because there is no waste/ oversize to backfill depleted zones.

Objectives of the study are to

• Investigate and demonstrate the feasibility, challenges as well as advantages of Sustainable Open Pit Concurrent Mining versus Conventional open pit mining
• Establish the conditions under which concurrent Mining open pit mining may be implemented as opposed to Conventional Open Pit Mining and why Mining companies currently opt for the latter