The Goldfields Environmental Management Group will hold its biennial conference in Kalgoorlie-Boulder next week to discuss rehabilitation and brainstorm ideas regarding mine closures, with 300 delegates expected.
Group chair Brandon Ovens said the conference would start on Wednesday and run until Friday, with about 37 presentations and panel discussions included.
“We still try and keep it Goldfields specific … it attracts a variety of consultants from all over the place, who come and exhibit new technologies and new ways of doing things that they’ve got on board, while also providing case studies … they’ve been working on (that) generally helps the environmental industry as we’re moving forward,” he said.
“The conference itself has … three days’ worth of presentations this year, ranging from a number of different mining companies, to consultants to government representatives reporting on various topics.”
Mr Ovens said the conference also included after-hours networking functions with donations going towards the Royal Flying Doctor Service.
“The conference is set out in a series of sessions so we’ve tried to tailor each session to cover a particular topic,”he said.
“We’ve got sessions that relate more to contamination, closure issues in that space, ones that focus on biological matters, more flora and fauna based, rehabilitation issues, regulatory aspects, community aspects.
“We sort of split it into sessions that group those together and this year we’ve made the decision to change it around.
“So rather than having each individual presentation and have a question session at the end, (we will) group the questions for each session collectively at the end of the session to sort of create a panel discussion to get a little bit more engagement out of the audience.”
Mr Ovens said the group had made the decision to keep the conference in person and offline to ensure everyone was in a room to collectively discuss topics together.
He said the number of attendees had “definitely increased” in recent years, with 300-350 delegates attending each conference.
Mr Ovens said registration for the conference had closed but people could still register if they needed to by contacting the group.