With the focus on advancing and consolidating a recycling culture, at the Teniente 8 Railway, in the El Teniente Division, initiatives seeking to contribute to sustainability are increasing. If last year they began with the recycling of plastic bottles, today the focus has been extended to personal protection equipment (PPE).

The Mies company installed five containers on the Platform, where the maintenance operations centre operates, so that workers can deposit their unused personal protective equipment, duly segregated, which will then be transferred to a treatment plant in Buin to be processed by a specialist company.

The initiative arose from the concern of the head of security for Mies' Overhaul contract, Alexis Banda. “The company gave me a scholarship to do a master's degree in Environmental Management and along the way we detected that there was room for improvement in disposing of unused safety equipment, since they were often left in containers combined with household waste, so there was no good segregation,” he explains.

The containers were installed in August and the area assures that, to date, the message has been understood and there has been a good reception. Along these lines, Banda points out that they have already filled four maxi bags, so they plan to complete six in December and thus reach the first ton of recycled PPE this year.

Sustainable culture

“Before we implemented recycling, we found glasses, earplugs, and unused overalls thrown away everywhere. We changed the culture of the workers. They are no longer throwing their glasses or shoes into the trash, but rather they are recycling, they are aware of recycling,” says Andrés Donaire, Teniente 8’s Overhaul contract administrator.

Eduardo Villalobos, head of the Teniente 8 Railway Unit, stressed that “Mies has always been open to innovation and new ideas. We had had recycling initiatives of other types, but not of PPE, so we are happy and the idea is to maintain this and also expand it to other processes.”

Mies Operations Manager, Sebastián Ponce, highlighted the synergy that this project represents between Codelco's values, which assumed six commitments with specific sustainability goals by 2030, and those of Mies: “Sustainable energy is one of our corporate principles, always with some component of renewable energy or innovation in sustainability and that, in some way, has been combined with what both the Division and Codelco are seeking.”