Drinking Water Distribution Network Enhances Local Community’s Health and Wellness.
For the second year in a row, Agnico Eagle has won a Towards Sustainable Mining® (TSM) Excellence Award from the Mining Association of Canada (MAC). This year’s award honours innovative community development work at our Pinos Altos mine, which has helped 300 families in Mexico gain access to clean, sustainable drinking water.
Water is essential to human life and vital to community health and wellness. We need it to feed our families, to clean our homes, and for basic hygiene and sanitation uses.
Unfortunately, the people of Yepachic, a mountainous community in northern Mexico, have long had difficulty accessing drinking water from the local springs. After extensive community surveys and consultations, our Pinos Altos team, in collaboration with officials from the Municipality of Temosachic, built a drinking water distribution network.
Local community members were directly involved in the design and implementation of the network which uses low-carbon technology – a 60-cell solar system and electrical grid power a pumping system to provide a continuous supply of clean, fresh drinking water to the community.
Victor Hugo Saenz, Community Relations Manager at Pinos Altos, says, “Today, more than 300 families and 1,120 people now have access to this essential resource – as well as the local medical clinic and schools, which can now provide the proper services and care for their patients and students, and ensure their basic needs are met.”
According to MAC, this winning and self-sustaining initiative will provide lasting benefits for all aspects of community life. “Through responsible water stewardship, the use of low carbon energy sources and community engagement, Agnico Eagle is leading the way in ensuring life sustaining infrastructure is available for those in need.”
Given the lasting social and health benefits achieved with this innovative distribution network, Agnico Eagle is expanding the project to serve other communities, with additional projects currently under consideration.
Congratulations to everyone at Pinos Altos for helping communities thrive and their citizens to live healthier and more fulfilling lives. Agnico Eagle’s first TSM Excellence Award was also won by Pinos Altos for its state-of-the-art soil regeneration initiative through Ultra-High-Density Grazing (UHDG), another example of how the mine is innovating and leaving a healthy environment for future generations.
Want to learn more about the drinking water distribution network? Watch the video below, which also highlights the project’s contribution to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal # 6 – the availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.