What does social conflict actually cost a mining company - not in reputation, but in dollars? Sarah is joined by Doron Tadmor, who recently completed his PhD studying how mining companies navigate stakeholder and political risk with indigenous communities.

The conversation centres on Doron's paper in Resources Policy, which examined 28 large-scale mining projects in Peru and identified $31.9 billion in conflict-related costs - 93% of it from lost productivity due to blockades and suspended operations. But the more interesting finding is on the other side: companies that invest early in proactive community engagement see significantly lower costs over time.

Sarah and Doron dig into what that engagement actually looks like in practice, why Doron thinks the industry should move past the idea of a "social license to operate" toward genuine "social integration," and why understanding a community's history with past mining projects matters as much as understanding the geology. It's a much needed conversation that puts hard numbers behind an argument many have made for years: doing right by communities and doing right by the business are actually the same strategy.

Read Doron's papers below:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301420726001893

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41267-025-00778-y

Produced by ⁠Critical Productions⁠. Sponsored by ⁠Satarla⁠.

Burak Kaplanoglu was doing sustainability work long before the word was fashionable, beginning with a concern for the people on site. Born in Istanbul and in the UK since 1995, he has built his career on some of the world’s largest capital projects, from the London 2012 Olympics to the FIFA World Cup in Qatar and Expo 2020. Two years ago he left a global consultancy to set up on his own as director of SBKaplan, and guest lectures at the LSE.

At the heart of the conversation is a Rubik’s Cube: turn one face and every other shifts. That is exactly what happens when construction tries to decarbonise, automate or swap one material for another. We can no longer treat carbon, raw materials, human rights and economics as separate problems, Burak argues – they are faces of the same cube. Alongside embodied carbon, he asks us to weigh embodied human rights.

The conversation also moves through a sector facing fewer people and more machines, why small contractors stay trapped in out of sight, out of mind, the trade-offs behind timber, concrete and diesel alternatives, and why honesty about what we don’t yet know may be the most responsible position of all.

Produced by Critical Productions. Sponsored by Satarla.

We recycle steel. We're rather good at it. But recycling isn't the same as reuse, and that gap is quietly costing us. 

In the latest episode of the Responsible Raw Materials podcast, engineer Gareth Byatt makes the case with a simple question: can a steel beam simply remain a steel beam? Today, when a building comes down, we crush much of it, downcycling steel into low-grade rebar and burying valuable niobium, copper and nickel along with it. The materials survive, but their value doesn't. 

Gareth's argument is that reuse has to be designed in from the very start. If we only ask what we can recover once the demolition crew arrives, most of the important decisions have already been made. He also reframes our towns and cities as mines in their own right, full of steel, copper and concrete we've already paid to extract. 

What would our cities look like if we designed every building to be taken apart? 

Listen now: search 'Responsible Raw Materials' wherever you get your podcasts, or visit responsiblerawmaterials.com. Produced by Critical Productions. 

What Happens to a Smart Meter After It Leaves Your Wall

Helen Woodcock came to sustainability through risk management, and a refusal to accept that anything is simply the way it works. Over a career in energy services, she worked inside a major UK organisation installing smart meters, heat pumps and other household energy technology, responsible for their whole life cycle. She now works independently in Northern Ireland, helping smaller organisations understand their supply chains. She talks about the ripple effect and how if we can help small businesses understand their own story, values and operations, and ask better questions of its suppliers, those suppliers go on to do the same

Her argument is simple. We keep digging for new material when huge amounts of copper, steel and precious metals sit in the technology around us. A smart meter, as Helen calls it, is a board in a box. Trace its materials back and the picture turns woolly by the third or fourth tier, as suppliers, mines and sites keep shifting.

It also follows the same product the other way: why a meter can be almost entirely recycled yet not easily remade from a recycled one, why a single radiator becomes an ownership grey area the moment a heat pump goes in, and why doing the right thing depends on the system around it.

Produced by Critical Productions. Learn more at responsiblerawmaterials.com

Visit Helen's YouTube Channel, 'Finding My Place': https://www.youtube.com/@finding-my-place

Contact Helen at [email protected] or visit www.purpull.com

Mine Closure and the True Cost of Metals

Mine closure is one of the biggest unsolved challenges in responsible mining, and Peter Harvey has spent the last seven years at the heart of it. His route was unusual: environmental science, then outdoor education for young people excluded from school (companies he still directs), a master's in occupational psychology, and a decade enabling mineral exploration across West Africa, Asia and beyond, before seventeen years at Rio Tinto spanning exploration, operations and closure.

His argument cuts to the core of sustainable mining: the true cost of extraction has never been in the price of the metal. We pay to pull minerals from the ground, not to clean up what's left, a closure liability the major mining companies alone value at over ninety billion dollars, and one few have any incentive to disclose. Design a mine with the end in mind, he argues, and you cut long-term liabilities and leave land genuinely fit for its next use.

This episode also covers mine rehabilitation and post-mining land use, the sector's culture of poor transparency, who belongs at the table (governments, financiers, and Indigenous and First Nations communities), and a Navajo approach to planning seven generations ahead.

Produced by Critical Productions. Learn more at responsiblerawmaterials.com

Why Tax Is the Most Powerful Word in Mining 

Tim Law is a chartered accountant and tax expert who spent nearly two decades in corporate tax teams, twelve of them inside a major mining company. What makes him worth hearing is where that path led - from tax returns to the murkier questions of who owns, controls and benefits from the world's mineral wealth. 

His argument starts somewhere unexpected: tax, he says, is the least boring subject in mining, because it is where the balance between risk and reward is settled between companies and the countries they operate in. From there the conversation widens into corruption, which Tim traces not to weak regulation but to two stubborn human forces, greed and inequality. Companies don't take bribes, he points out; people do. 

Along the way he unpacks beneficial ownership (identifying the real people behind a company) and contract transparency (why public deals are negotiated differently). Expect candy-shop money laundering, a potato-buying scandal, an airport shakedown he talked his way out of, and a warning about the corners being cut in the rush for critical minerals. 

Produced by Critical Productions. Learn more at responsiblerawmaterials.com 

Gas, The Strait of Hormuz and the Raw Materials Geopolitical Landscape of the Middle East 

Michael Barron is a Middle East political risk specialist who came to natural resources by an unusual route. He studied Arabic, worked in consultancy, then moved into the oil and gas industry - a background that lets him read a gas field and a government with equal fluency. He is also the author of The Gaza Marine Story, which traces the untapped gas field off the coast of Gaza that, more than two decades after its discovery, has still not been developed. 

His central point is that political events can erupt overnight, but the trends that produce them - population growth, economic pressure, shifting alliances - build over years. Good risk management, he argues, isn't about predicting the next headline. It's about recognising those slower currents early enough not to be surprised. 

The conversation moves through Gaza, Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, gas as a feedstock for fertiliser, the region's under-explored mineral wealth, and why national interest matters more than any single government. 

Michaels Book, ‘The Gaza Marine Story: The Politics and Intrigue Behind Palestine’s Untapped Gas Wealth’ is available now - https://www.nomad-publishing.com/the-gaza-marine-story-2.html

Listen to Michaels’ 2023 Responsible Raw Materials Conference presentation on ‘ Building Trust Using Beneficial Ownership Transparency’ here: https://responsiblerawmaterials.com/post/michael-barron-tim-law-building-trust-using-beneficial-ownership-transparency/ 

Produced by Critical Productions. Learn more at responsiblerawmaterials.com 

David Strang: Challenging Everything the Industry Takes for Granted 

David Strang has had an unusual route into mining leadership. A Glaswegian raised in a South African mining town, he studied applied earth sciences at Stanford on an athletics scholarship, ran for Great Britain at the 1996 Olympics, then learned company-building under Ross Beaty at Lumina Copper - a portfolio eventually acquired for more than US$1.6 billion. In 2016 he co-founded Ero Copper, where he is now executive chairman of a business running copper and gold operations in Brazil. 

At the heart of the conversation is David's habit of questioning what the industry takes for granted. Why don't geologists have a stronger voice? Why do we assume experience only comes with age? Why shouldn't a young engineer use AI to rethink how a mine runs? And why can't a mining company create value that outlasts the ore body itself? 

We also explore social licence, the sector's push into AI, his sponsorship of Stanford's Mineral-X programme, and a goat-herding project that shows what genuine community partnership looks like. 

Produced by Critical Productions. Learn more at responsiblerawmaterials.com 

Melody McNeil is an agriculture and natural resource economist who has spent decades working with USAID and Catholic Relief Services across East and Central Africa, Afghanistan, and South Sudan - not inside mining companies, but alongside them, and who has seen first-hand what happens when above-ground conditions are treated as an afterthought.  

The conversation centres on a deceptively simple question: if you were the CEO of a small exploration company, how would you do it? 

What unfolds is a genuinely thought-provoking discussion about how the extractive industries value risk, and whether they are truly accounting for the full picture. Melody argues that geology should not come first; that the moment exploration begins, expectations form, politics mobilise, and communities start to position themselves around what may or may not materialise. The cost of catching those signals late is often borne most heavily by the people least equipped to absorb it. 

Together, Melody and Sarah explore informal land tenure, benefit sharing, elite capture, and the idea of treating the operating environment as part of the asset itself - not a checklist to complete, but an input to every decision from day one. They also ask a more uncomfortable question: does knowledge gathered on the ground truly belong to the company that gathered it? And what happens when it never makes it back to the communities it came from? 

To hear more from Melody at the 2026 Responsible Raw Materials conference, where she speaks on ‘Creating Certainty Above Ground: How Stakeholder Alignment, Political Foresight, And Community Trust De-Risk Critical Mineral Projects’ visit:  

https://responsiblerawmaterials.com/post/melody-mcneil-2026-creating-certainty-above-ground-how-stakeholder-alignment-political-foresight-and-community-trust-de-risk-critical-mineral-projectsmelody-mcneil-2026/ 

John Thompson is a geoscientist who spent five decades deliberately moving between industry and academia. After studying geology at Oxford, he went on to explore for magmatic sulphides in Norway and Maine, spend four years in Australia, found the Mineral Deposit Research Unit at UBC, and serve as Chief Geoscientist and VP of Technology at Teck.

The thread running through John's career is something he diagnoses with frankness - a limited attention span. What is clear from this conversation is how that apparent flaw became a kind of competitive advantage. Where most scientists pick a lane, John kept changing lanes, accumulating a different sort of knowledge: the kind that comes from four hours in a truck with a geologist who eventually tells you everything.

The conversation also moves through the politics of bridging a sceptical academic faculty at UBC, what running 200 people across metallurgy and environment at Teck taught him, and the three problems he still wants to solve: the mystery of IOCG deposits, the full-stack challenge of mine waste, and the case for in-situ recovery.

Produced by Critical Productions. Learn more at responsiblerawmaterials.com