Sustainability is something that is ever important but not necessarily easy to progress. It can get rather complex quite quickly and with diverse and critical stakeholders, we have to be very systematic. This paper is a discussion on sustainability over the years with a focus on the changes seen in the mining industry. Despite somewhat heroic efforts by the industry to take a coordinated approach to sustainability, it is clear that many see mining as broken. The paper discusses some of the technical advances both near term and longer that will ensure that mining is seen as sustainable and that companies are seen as integrated development partners. The mine of the future will be very deep, will have a negligible footprint, much lower energy requirements and will only bring to the surface the primary products required by an increasingly circular economy. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.