Procrastination may not pay in tailings management

Dry tailings disposal methods that reduce environmental impacts and yield more readily rehabilitated sites are not being widely adopted due to the perceived high cost of implementation. The overall liability may be reduced by improving tailings disposal methods, however, current accounting methods place emphasis on deferral of expenditure. Current accounting standards do not effectively deal with the financial management of tailings disposal, therefore many governments opt for environmental sureties to ensure provision for rehabilitation. Dry disposal methods are disfavoured by current surety evaluation mechanisms. Full Cost Accounting (FCA), a unit-of-waste, full liability method of accounting, should be used for tailings disposal, writing off costs in proportion to disposal rate. Tailings may be viewed as a negative cost of production to emphasise waste reduction strategies. The tailings facility may be operated as an entity separate to the processing plant and charge a fee for disposal, encouraging waste minimisation from the plant.