COFFEE WITH ASPASA

Despite keeping a relatively low profile, surface miners who provide the sand and aggregate we build with represent some of the biggest mining operations on the continent. As Nico Pienaar explains, the largest mining house in Africa isn’t one of the grand names headlining the magnate class – it’s Lafarge-Holcim. As Director of ASPASA, Pienaar’s organisation provides pivotal services to this vital segment of our economy; everything from safety to community engagement to regulatory compliance.

ASPASA casts a wider net than its acronym suggests, now representing most small-scale mining operations in addition to surface miners. In this interview with Concrete Trends’ Publishing Editor, Nicholas McDiarmid, Pienaar goes shares crucial insights about how to operate under the new lockdown conditions that are beneficial for all construction, infrastructure operations and maintenance sites – based on the in-situ learnings from throughout the period, in which surface mines were able to continue operations.