Elsevier

Minerals Engineering

Volume 107, June 2017, Pages 34-42
Minerals Engineering

Sustainable practices in the management of mining waste: A focus on the mineral resource

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mineng.2016.12.004Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Human decisions have a great importance in the distinction between waste and ore.

  • The mine waste management hierarchy (MWMH) aims at maximising resource recovery.

  • In priority order, the MWMH’s elements are: reduce, reprocess, downcycle, dispose.

  • Academic and industry examples are provided to illustrate the MWMH application.

  • Resource recovery strategies should combine MWMH elements across the life of mine.

Abstract

The environmental legacies of metal mining are often dominated by large waste facilities, which can be sources of acid and metalliferous drainage, resulting in both local pollution and irreversible loss of some of the soluble minerals. Whether a material is treated as waste or ore depends on a wide variety of factors and circumstances. Three critical aspects – time, the extractive strategy and the economic context - are discussed in this paper. The authors argue that the fine line between waste and ore requires a mine waste management (MWM) hierarchy that properly considers waste as a potential future resource. This hierarchy exhibits four main levels: reduce, reprocess & stockpile, downcycle and dispose, which are illustrated by a review of both academic research and public data on industrial practices. The authors conclude that to generate the most successful outcomes the hierarchy must operate across all levels and is a core component of an overall mine sustainability framework.

Introduction

There are a variety of sustainability frameworks adaptable or specifically designed for the mining industry. These frameworks, originating from academia, governments and industry, are attempting to comprehend the sustainable mining challenge and contribute to the understanding of this complex problem.

The authors have argued that a key element of sustainable mining is the mineral resource itself (Lèbre and Corder, 2015), a resource that is finite and non-renewable. They also argued, along with other authors (e.g. Ayres et al., 2002, Fonseca et al., 2013, Laurence, 2011), that most sustainability frameworks tend to overlook that aspect, which makes the mining industry unique in the sustainability challenge.

Principle 8 of the ICMM principles (ICMM, 2015) connects mining activities to downstream use and disposal of metal-containing products, engaging the mining industry in the global efforts to close material cycles through recycling. However, before extending the extractive industry’s responsibility across the entire value chain, it is worthwhile investigating opportunities at the mine site level.

The five capitals framework (Porritt, 2003) includes the mineral resource in the natural capital, and the mining industry will carry out a transfer from this capital to the four other capitals (in particular the manufactured capital, but also the financial, human and social capitals). The question is: how effective is this transfer? At the mine site level, how much of the mineral resource is being effectively extracted and utilised, and how much is left behind? There is evidence that a significant part of the resource is left behind as waste (Laurence, 2011).

The aim of this paper is to review reported practices of management of mining waste and categorise these within a proposed hierarchy with a specific focus on metal mining. This hierarchy prioritises strategies that lead to minimising losses of minerals and enhancing the utilisation of mineralised waste over the life of mine. The paper is structured as follows. First, we overview the origin of mineralised waste at the mine site level and introduce a mind-set change to better distinguish the difference between ore and waste. Second, the MWM hierarchy is presented and illustrated with examples from both academia and industry. The final part of the paper consists of a discussion on how proactive waste management approaches can be coupled with remediation and rehabilitation efforts to deliver improved outcomes.

Section snippets

The fine line between resource and waste

In a metal mine, mineralised waste may originate from three main production stages: mining, minerals processing and metallurgical processing. Inefficiencies caused by various factors occur in each stage and result in mineral losses to waste rock, tailings, slag and leached ore. Mine water is a fifth waste stream that comes into contact with solid waste either naturally or by being introduced during one of the production stages. The resulting waste water is charged with dissolved metals. This

A holistic approach to mineral waste management

The authors have previously proposed a hierarchy for the management of mining waste (Lèbre and Corder, 2015) that prioritises waste minimisation and mineral recovery (Fig. 2). This hierarchy was based on modifying and adapting the generic waste management pyramid “reduce, reuse, recycle” (3Rs) to mining waste, reflecting its specificity.

The 3Rs pyramid is commonly used in policy making, e.g. in the European Union (Hansen et al., 2002) and in Australia (DIIS, 2016). It was primarily designed for

Discussion on the application of the mine waste management hierarchy

In order to analyse how different elements of the proposed MWM hierarchy are represented and reported in the academic literature, we searched for and classified the referred publications on environmental issues from the Minerals Engineering International database over 2011–2015 (Table 2). The areas covered by these papers showed a dominance of two main topics: mining technologies applied to waste recycling further down the value chain, notably post-consumer waste; and AMD mitigation.

Conclusions

While the general perception within the mining industry is that waste management and rehabilitation are considered a burden, this paper has examined and analysed proactive approaches for the management of mineralised waste. The key aim of the paper has been to identify approaches that could maximise resource utilisation and value generation from waste while mitigating its environmental impact. Furthermore, increasing mineral extraction and resource utilisation from existing mine sites, be they

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the Wealth from Waste Research Cluster, a collaborative program between the Australian CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific Industrial Research Organisation); University of Technology, Sydney; The University of Queensland, Swinburne University of Technology, Monash University and the Center for Industrial Ecology at Yale University.

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