Toward sustainable reprocessing and valorization of sulfidic copper tailings: Scenarios and prospective LCA.

There has been increasing attention recently to reprocessing of mining waste, which aims to recover potentially valuable materials such as metals and other byproducts from untapped resources. Mining waste valorization may offer environmental advantages over traditional make-waste-dispose approaches. However, a quantitative environmental assessment for large-scale reprocessing, accounting for future trends and a broad set of environmental indicators, is still lacking.

Regionalized Life Cycle Inventories of Global Sulfidic Copper Tailings.

Worldwide, an issue of copper production is the generation of mine waste with varying characteristics. This waste can pollute natural environments, and in particular, the heavy metal emissions of the tailings may pose long-term consequences. Currently, life cycle assessments of mine tailings are hampered by both limited data availability in the metal production value chain and lack of appropriate methodologies.

The environmental performance of enhanced metal recovery from dry municipal solid waste incineration bottom ash.

This study assesses the environmental performance of the municipal solid waste (MSW) incineration bottom ash (IBA) treatment plant in Hinwil, Switzerland, a large-scale industrial plant, which also serves as a full-scale laboratory for new technologies and aims at an optimal recovery of metals in terms of quantity and quality. Based on new mass-flow data, we perform a life cycle assessment that includes the recovery of iron, stainless steel, aluminium, copper, lead, silver and gold. Fraction-specific modelling allows for investigating the effect of the metal fraction quality on the subsequent secondary metal production as well as examining further metal recycling potentials in the residual IBA.