The modest divergence does not signal a crisis, but it flags that energy management programs have not yet offset production-volume pressure on the energy line
The Breaking Point
Santacruz Silver’s Carrizal Mining operation spent 2025 doing something most mid-tier underground miners in Latin America postpone: building a formal ESG baseline from scratch. The 2025 Sustainability Report — the first ever for the Mexican subsidiary now renamed Compañía Minera Zilar Mendi — was prepared against GRI 2021 Standards and covers a full calendar year of underground operations at the Zimapan mine in Mexico.
The significance for peers is not the report itself. Sustainability disclosures at this scale are increasingly table stakes. What matters is the specific operating data now in the public domain: energy intensity per tonne of concentrate, hazardous waste volumes, hours worked, and fatality outcomes across a 780-person underground workforce. For a Mining Operations Director benchmarking against comparable underground silver-zinc operations, these numbers provide a reference point that is genuinely scarce in mid-tier reporting.
Where the Shift Accelerated
The energy figure is the most operationally telling data point in the report. Carrizal Mining recorded electricity consumption of 696.31 kWh per tonne of concentrate produced in 2025, a rise of 2 kWh per tonne from 2024. Taken in isolation, a two-unit increase sounds marginal. But the report simultaneously notes that flotation tailings volumes increased by 1.17% in line with higher production — meaning throughput moved up while energy intensity also edged higher. That is not the direction an underground operation wants to travel. Efficiency gains should, in principle, compress the energy-per-tonne ratio as throughput rises. The modest divergence does not signal a crisis, but it flags that energy management programs have not yet offset production-volume pressure on the energy line.
On the waste side, the result is cleaner. Non-mineral hazardous waste generation fell 27.62% year-over-year, attributed to stricter process controls and waste minimization programs. That is a material reduction across a single reporting period, with a direct cost implication: hazardous waste handling, storage, and compliant disposal in Mexican underground operations represent a real OPEX line. The mechanism behind the reduction — tighter process controls rather than production curtailment — is the operationally transferable lesson.
The safety record for the period was zero workplace fatalities across 2,255,624 hours worked by 780 employees. The operation also recorded 657 lost days from occupational incidents, a figure that contextualizes the fatality outcome without overstating it. Underground silver-zinc mining carries persistent injury exposure even when fatality controls hold; lost-time incident data is the more granular signal for workforce risk management.
Where This Hits Mining Operations Directors
Three practical readings emerge for directors running comparable underground operations.
First, the energy intensity benchmark. If your underground processing circuit is running materially above 696 kWh per tonne of concentrate, you now have a mid-tier Mexico reference for that metric. If you are running below it, the question is whether your ore complexity, reagent regime, or milling circuit configuration makes the comparison meaningful. Either way, the number is in the public domain and will appear in peer comparisons.
Second, the hazardous waste reduction rate. A 27.62% year-on-year decline achieved through process controls — not production scaling — suggests genuine operational leverage in waste minimization programs at underground silver operations. For directors facing tightening environmental compliance obligations under Mexico’s environmental regulations or equivalent jurisdictions, this is the type of outcome that regulators and communities will increasingly expect to see evidenced in formal reporting.
Third, the governance structure is maturing. Carrizal Mining linked executive performance evaluations to environmental, safety, ethics, and human rights outcomes during 2025 and plans to establish a formal Sustainability Committee in 2026. For Mining Operations Directors whose corporate owners are building ESG-linked executive accountability structures, this trajectory illustrates what that looks like at site level in a mid-tier underground context: annual performance linkage first, then committee oversight. The sequencing matters for those designing implementation roadmaps.
What Could Still Change the Read
The report is self-disclosed and prepared with reference to GRI standards, but no independent third-party assurance is described in the source material. That limits how far a peer operation should push these numbers as benchmarks. The 696.31 kWh per tonne figure reflects Carrizal Mining’s specific ore type, milling circuit configuration, and concentrate grade — variables that can shift energy intensity significantly across underground silver operations. Without knowing head grade and recovery, the energy number cannot be directly transposed.
The lost-day figure — 657 days across the reporting period — also lacks the LTIFR or TRIFR normalizations that would make it directly comparable to industry benchmarks. The hours-worked total is provided, so the calculation is possible, but the report does not make that step. Directors drawing safety comparisons should perform that calculation before drawing conclusions.
Finally, the 2026 forward commitments — Sustainability Committee formation, expanded materiality assessment, technology adoption — are stated intentions, not confirmed outcomes. Their operational value will be visible only in the 2026 report.
The Question This Leaves Your Team
If your underground operation is not yet producing auditable energy-per-tonne and hazardous-waste data at the level of granularity Carrizal Mining published for 2025, what is the minimum reporting infrastructure — monitoring systems, process controls, data capture — that would need to be in place before your next annual operating review?
Sources
- Newsfilecorp — Santacruz Silver Announces Publication of 2025 Sustainability Report for Mexican Operations (Link)
