This portal brings together all of the disclosures that mining companies have made about their tailings storage facilities. It gives communities, investors, regulators and the media unprecedented access to information about mine waste.

The Global Tailings Portal, launched in January 2020, is a free, searchable database with detailed information on more than 1,800 mine tailings dams around the world. It enables users to sort data about tailings dams by location, company, dam type, height, volume, and risk, among other factors. The data was submitted by more than 100 of the world’s largest mining companies, in response to requests from institutional investors. Previously, very little information about mine tailings dams was publicly available. The portal is designed to be used by governments, scientists, the finance community, the mining industry, media, and civil society.

The portal was built and is hosted by GRID-Arendal in collaboration with the Investor Mining and Tailings Safety Initiative, which is co-Chaired by the Church of England Pensions Board and the Swedish National Pension Funds' Council on Ethics, with support from the UN Environment Programme.

This current “beta” version of the portal (launched 24 Jan 2020) is still undergoing testing, development, and verification. We welcome feedback, and note that the portal provides links to the underlying public disclosures that companies have made.

More detailed information on the methodology applied to translate data from company disclosures into the portal database is available in our Methodology section, and further details of our quality assurance processes are available below.

In due course we intend to make the database available as a downloadable Excel and CSV file. Currently, this data is available on request from GRID-Arendal.

Tags: chemicals toxics and heavy metals emerging issue industry mining tailings dam waste