Environmental Life Cycle Assessment for a Large-Scale Gold Mining

Abstract

Mining, generally speaking, is an industry which consumes water in an intensive way, and when metal fineness is less and more mineral is extracted, the consumption of this important source will also increase. In the last 40 years alone, global production trends of the mineral extractive, manufacturing and services industries have grown steadily. In Peru, for example, it has reduced the total area of glaciers and fresh water in the coasts, where around 60% of the population lives. For reasons like the one above, it is becoming more and more necessary to identify and assess the impacts that this sector generates in order to be able to propose solutions at least for the most significant ones. In this article, using the life cycle assessment (LCA) software SimaPro, an assessment focused on large scale gold mining by heap leaching has been made, identifying that the processes that have the worst effects on the environment resulted to be processing, mainly, and leaching in second place. Moreover, the most affected impact categories were: climate change, agricultural land occupation, water and metal depletion. On the other hand, another three different impact categories, terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecotoxicity, showed an inverse result which could be translated as a potential positive impact, however due to the inventory and data collected, the affirmation cannot be possible to sustain.