KCM signs $498m deal to mine its own waste — the biggest tailings recovery plant in Africa

Konkola Copper Mines has signed a US$498 million agreement with China's NERIN Engineering to build a copper recovery plant at its Chingola operations — a facility the company says will add 70,000 tonnes of annual output by leaching metal from existing mine tailings, and will be the largest of its kind in Africa, Reuters reported.

Under the agreement, NERIN provides engineering, procurement and construction, plus commissioning, performance testing and training. The plant does not dig a single new tonne of ore: it monetises decades of stockpiled waste, turning an environmental liability into feedstock at a moment when copper trades near multi-year highs on demand from power grids, data centres and electric vehicles.

The deal slots into a wider KCM rebuild. The company is targeting 300,000 tonnes of integrated copper by 2031 from around 140,000 tonnes this financial year, anchored on the Konkola Deep reserve — more than 291 million tonnes of ore grading up to 3.3 percent. Vedanta has parked the asset in CopperTech Metals, its US-domiciled vehicle, announced US$1.5 billion of expansion capital and filed for a New York listing that could raise up to US$423.5 million at a valuation of up to US$3.57 billion. State-owned ZCCM Investments Holdings retains 20.6 percent.

Timing helps. KCM's Nchanga smelter has just completed a planned 60-day maintenance shutdown that ran from June into mid-September, part of a Copperbelt-wide maintenance wave that also took Mopani and Chambishi offline and squeezed the sulphuric acid on which leach plants feed. KCM reported net sales of US$1.33 billion for the year to March 2026, up from US$398 million a year earlier.

Zambia produced 890,346 tonnes of copper in 2025 against a national target of three million tonnes by 2031. Plants like Chingola's — capital-intensive, power-hungry, and built on rock that was once thrown away — are where that arithmetic is supposed to come from.

Sources: Reuters via CNBC Africa (17 Sep 2026); Energy News Network, "Konkola Deep drives toward 300,000 tonnes" (14 Sep 2026); Ecofin Agency / Reuters on the CopperTech listing (Jun 2026); Miningmx (Jun 2026); BCInsight (Jun 2026); company statements.