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working hand in glove at Rio Tinto
GREG LILLEYMAN
PRESIDENT, PILBARA OPERATIONS
RIO TINTO
Achieving the objective of zero harm operations continues to be a key
driver at Rio Tinto, with responsibility for safety at work and home
being a significant priority for staff at every level of the organisation.
Greg Lilleyman from the company’s Pilbara Operations describes
some of the initiatives and technologies that are evolving at Rio Tinto
to facilitate more safe and efficient procedures, and ultimately to help
ensure staff’s greater well-being and quality of life.
Safety is an issue which concerns everyone in the mining industry,
and rightly so. While we are always focused on generating greater
value for our shareholders through greater production and
improved efficiency, doing so at the expense of our workers’ well-
being would be unthinkable.
However, presenting safety as some sort of priority over
operational efficiency might be a misleading message from some
people. Greater efficiency should lead to safety improvement
anyway, rather than be seen as a trade-off between one and
the other.
An example is Rio Tinto’s well known focus on technology
and innovation, through such initiatives as the
Mine of The Future
program. While this will enable us to produce more tonnes while
keeping various operating costs under control, we should never
forget the direct benefit to the well-being of our people – and this is
a quite deliberate aim of the program.
To put it simply, each technology improvement de-risks a
potential hazard. No matter how well we maintain our control of
open-cut mining operations – and we will always seek to do that – it
is a fact of life that a worker able to manage those operations from
an appropriate office workstation will face less potential safety
issues than if he were in the pit itself. And that’s the case whether
that office is on the site, near the site or 1,500 kilometres away at
our operations centre in Perth.
Our goal is, and always will be, zero harm. Safety is everyone’s
responsibility and everyone, from senior leadership down, needs to
be engaged and committed to safety, both at work and at home –
this is the consistent message we give all of our people.
SAFETY&EFFICIENT OPERATIONS
RIO TINTO’S RAIL OPERATIONS HAVE LONG BEEN AT THE FOREFRONT OF SAFETY PERFORMANCE, TAKING OUT THIS YEAR’S CHIEF EXECUTIVE’S SAFETY AWARD FOR ITS OUTSTANDING RECORD