Highly filled PBT

Abstract

Technology plays a central role in mining activities throughout Australia and is critical to achieving greater economic and environmental sustainability. Our choices about which technologies to develop, adopt and deploy in the landscape reflect one of the most critical interfaces between mining and society. There have been numerous reviews and studies of the social licence of the mining industry, which have examined the way in which public perceptions influence the broad acceptance and approval of mining activities. However, very few studies have examined public perceptions of the technologies and extractive methods used by the mining industry. This paper therefore contributes to expand the scope of this mining-society scholarship by understanding the drivers that shape public perceptions in relation to established and emerging mining technologies. We present findings from a survey of Australian citizens (N = 476) that tested their general awareness of and response to different types of mining technologies and extraction methods that are currently in use. These included comparisons between three broad methods of resource extraction technologies including open cut, underground and in situ leach mining. Hydraulic fracturing, a technology that is used in conjunction with some forms of resource extraction, was also included. In this paper, we examine the relationships between the public's self-rated knowledge of these four mining technologies, their perceptions of the environmental and safety impacts of those technologies, and their level of acceptance of each mining technology using descriptive statistics and path analysis. Our research found that higher levels of overall acceptance were expressed for established technologies such as open cut and underground mining. However, our results also reveal a nuanced role for the type of knowledge that citizens may have about novel and emerging technologies in determining their acceptance of these technologies.