B.C. mine reclamation and scholarship awards

The B.C. Technical and Research Committee on Reclamation (TRCR) has named the recipients of its mine reclamation and scholarship award winners.

Centerra Gold (TSX: CG; MYSE: CGAU) and Chu Cho Environmental shared the Jake McDonald Annual Reclamation Award for their ongoing research into solving the reclamation questions at the Mount Milligan copper-gold mine and their partnership with local communities.

Mount Milligan’s environmental team, which includes Indigenous leaders, hosted tours of Centerra’s closed Endako and Kemess mines so that local Indigenous bands could identify successful reclamation methods and evaluate their application at Mount Milligan. The lessons learned form the basis of the reclamation plans for the Mount Milligan mine.

“Although the Covid-19 pandemic has been challenging for collaboration across communities, the Mount Milligan environmental team successfully brought together people from Indigenous Nations into the closure planning process and used examples of exemplary reclamation to apply what was learned to guide site-specific reclamation approaches at Mount Milligan,” says Tim Antill, awards subcommittee chair and incoming TRCR chair. 

Centerra  previously received the Jake McDonald Annual Reclamation Award for Mount Milligan at the 2016 symposium.  

The Tony Milligan Book Award was presented to Trevor Baker, Justin Straker and Max Ryan of Integral Ecology Group for the best paper delivered at the previous year’s BC Mine Reclamation Symposium. The paper, “Development of a soil water balance-based model for predicting ecosystem occurrence on post-closure landforms,” describes a system for more accurately predicting the soil moisture regime of reclaimed upland sites. 

The 2021 Jake McDonald Memorial Scholarship was awarded to second-year mining engineering student Jaxon Reid of Kamloops, B.C. He previously completed three years as a biology major at the University of Victoria, but he switched to mine engineering after working in a metallurgical lab and becoming more intrigued by a career in mining.

The BC TRCR was created in the early 2970s in response to the need expressed by the British Columbia mining sector for more government-industry communication about environmental protection and reclamation. 

Visit www.TRCR.BC.ca for more information about the annual mine reclamation symposium.