Tailings management aims to dispose of tailings at the minimum cost consistent with meeting or exceeding imposed standards, including legislative obligations. This simple business objective requires managing the tailings storage facility (TSF) risks associated with surface water, groundwater, dust, sustainable closure and potential catastrophic failure. The individual nature of every ore body and specific site topography ensures that no 'one size fits all'. It has been suggested that paste and thickened tailings (P&TT) provides the ability to tailor the production and transportation of tailings to suit the deposition site, rather than the traditional approach of accepting that the deposition site has to accommodate tailings of high variability. While the traditional approach can be made to work, it is directly linked to the catastrophic failures of tailings impoundments, where large volumes of decant water have triggered failures due to overtopping, piping or slope instability, or saturated tailings have simply liquefied. P&TT offers an ability to mitigate these risks and when implemented into new projects with variable tailings streams there are significant benefits to be realised. The paper identifies the inter-dependencies between the various tailings disposal processes, such as thickening, pumping and deposition. It demonstrates that there are benefits in taking a more integrated approach to the design and operation of tailings disposal facilities. A collaborative industry project to tackle this challenge is described.

The development of the thickened tailings disposal technique presents a new paradigm in tailings disposal. It results in a total revision of the risk profile of a tailings storage facility (TSF), and may provide significant savings in both cost and water consumption. The method was developed by Robinsky (1975), who identified that thickening the tailings stream would create a non-segregating slurry and that a steeper overall beach angle could be achieved. The outcome is the elimination, or the substantial reduction in size of retaining embankments. This has obvious benefits.The paper reviews the development history, and the key design and behavioural parameters that are needed for thickened tailings schemes, with an emphasis on the understanding of the fundamental geotechnical issues. Brief historyThe concept of thickened tailings storage was developed in Canada in the early 1970s by Robinsky (1975Robinsky ( , 1999. He identified that thickening the tailings stream sufficiently would create a non-segregating slurry i.e. hydraulic sorting would not occur on a sub-aerial beach, and that a steeper overall beach angle would be achieved. These properties permit tailings to be 'stacked', either as a low conical hill on flat ground, referred to as central thickened discharged (CTD), or as down-valley discharge (DVD).There are now about thirty known thickened discharge schemes operating worldwide (with some that have now closed). These are summarised in Figure 1, based on data presented in Williams et al. (2008). This figure is limited to schemes that are (or have been) fully operational, and are referenced in the literature or details are known to the authors.