Need to reduce water consumption? Start with dust control.

Mining companies are beginning to integrate water and dust management into their broader operational strategies. This shift reflects an industry-wide effort to reduce water inefficiencies and optimise the use of a scarce resource.

One miner leading the way in this area is BHP, which has developed a Water Stewardship Strategy to assess water-related risks at both operational and basin levels. It’s working towards a ‘water secure’ world by 2030 with public targets that aim to improve the management of water across their operations.

Similarly, Anglo American has a Sustainable Mining Plan to reduce freshwater withdrawals in water scarce areas by 50% by 2030. The company has designated water security as a principal risk as they acknowledge it’s “essential for our operations over the current life of mine and to support future growth.”

Teck Resources is another miner committed to becoming a net water-positive company by 2030. Proactively, they aim to contribute more water to the environment and communities than they consume through their Water Policy.

Despite these strong examples, inefficient water usage is still common throughout the industry. Some sites still rely on outdated systems where water sprays are manually activated, often spraying areas unnecessarily, such as empty stockpile zones.

Others spray only plain water to control road dust, which means water trucks continually run along roads—cycling up to 15 times per day. These practices not only waste water but also rely heavily on human intervention. The average Australian mine is estimated to use more than 2 million litres of water per day on roads, that’s more than 700 million litres each year at a single mine.

“The drum beats are certainly getting louder. Mining companies we’ve spoken to in Australia are centralising their water management approaches as a way to improve consistency and reduce waste across sites,” says Martin Krehenbrink, Managing Director at Bind-X.

“In the past, dust control often relied on running large water tanks and spraying plain water on the ground to keep dust levels down. While effective to some extent, this method is wasteful and increasingly unsustainable.”

Fortunately, advancements in technology now offer mine sites a more sustainable way forward—saving water usage on haul roads by 90%.

“If mining operators look at how much water they waste on haul roads alone, they would be stunned to see how easy it is to save water,” says Martin.

“In the past, operations teams might have tried dust suppression products and only seen marginal benefits or have found them messy to use.”

Biological dust control is a new category of road stabilisers that can replace traditional dust control methods like polymers, lignosulfonates, and bitumen emulsions. Developed by Bind-X, the process is completely clean and environmentally safe. It massively reduces water usage while stabilising road surfaces.

Biological dust control uses naturally occurring biological processes that bond soil particles together to create a durable, long-lasting crust that prevents dust from being released into the air. It’s effective on mine roads, even high-traffic haul roads, as well as tailings and stockpiles.

What sets this approach apart is its drastic reduction in water consumption. Instead of water trucks running multiple passes per day, this can be reduced to once a day, or even every few days.

For mines in arid regions, this creates a significant opportunity to conserve thousands of gigalitres of water annually—water that can instead be allocated to operational processes or returned to the environment.

Because biological solutions are non-toxic, they are completely clean for plants, animals, and surrounding waterways. This approach helps mining operations meet increasingly stringent sustainability requirements without compromising performance or safety.

These new, cleaner technologies are gentle on equipment, too. Operations can use their existing fleet of water trucks to apply them, and it won’t ruin pumps and render vehicles unusable, unlike some other traditional dust suppression options.

By applying biological dust control, mines can also cut down on fuel costs and labour associated with frequent water truck cycles. The longer-lasting nature of these treatments reduces the need for constant reapplication, in some cases from 15x per day to 1x per week.

Operations across Africa—in some of the driest and dustiest conditions—have successfully used biological dust control for several years, achieving dramatic reductions in water usage and improved compliance with environmental regulations. 

GCO Senegal, ArcelorMittal in Liberia, Jubilee Metals and other iron ore mines in South Africa, have reported significant cost savings while achieving more consistent dust control compared to traditional methods.

When more mines adopt modern dust control practices, it will have a big collective impact on water conservation for the industry. Mining companies operate in shared ecosystems where water is a scarce resource for communities, wildlife, and agriculture. By adopting new and proven technologies like biological dust control, the industry has the chance to gain some easy wins, and show how operational efficiency and environmental stewardship can go hand in hand.