Standards Development

Scope

This document aims to establish environmental, social and governance indicators for the evaluation and implementation of a sustainable mining management system for minerals and metals.

This document is applicable to the activities of mining, mineral concentration or transformation and extractive metallurgical industries.

The following are outside the scope of this document:

⎯ liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons; and

⎯ the investigation or exploitation of underground structures for use as geological storage of carbon dioxide; and

⎯ non-extractive metallurgy.

The requirements that a sustainable mining management system must meet are indicated in document prtEN xxxxx Sustainable mining- mineral processing- metallurgy management system. Indicators, which is based on UNE 22470.

Purpose

This proposal directly corresponds to the second policy priority identified in the 2024 annual Union work programme for European standardisation: “Exploration, extraction, refining and recycling of critical raw materials (Action 2)”. It falls under the category “(1) Resilience of European industry”. It will help in the implementation of the Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA), which is one of the
Commission’s flagship initiatives under the European Green Deal.
The proposal aims to help member states deploy their national policies on mineral raw materials by the contribution to achieve a higher sustainable raw materials industry and to raise public awareness of its relevance for social, economic and, of course, environmental objectives of EU, fully aligned with UN SDGs and with EC-EU Principles for sustainable raw materials.
It will take into consideration critical raw materials and all the other essential raw materials industries to increase EU’s resilience and to increase supply from European local sources. It will be applicable by all the mineral raw materials companies including SMEs (more than 98%).

Note 1: This project has received funding from the European Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency (EISMEA) - Action grants (SMP-STAND-2024-ESOS-01-IBA) under the Standardisation strand of the Single Market Programme. This funding continues to support the standardisation activities of the three European Standardisation Organisations (ESOs): CEN, CENELEC, and ETSI.
The focus is on Topic 2, which encompasses the exploration, extraction, refining, and recycling of critical raw materials (Action 2).
Note 2: This proposal is based on UNE 22470 Sustainable mining- mineral processing- metallurgy management system — Indicators.