vEGU 2021 – Towards an environmentally sustainable transformation of tailings and mine waste: circular economy and future vision. Call for abstracts deadline: 13 January 2021
The increasing demand for raw materials, to supply the needs of both society and industry, imposes many environmental, societal, and technological challenges on the mining value chain. Mining, quarrying, and metallurgical industries are of course required to meet the increasing demand, but these activities are inevitably accompanied by the production of large volumes of residues through both exploitation and processing. Accompanying these challenges has been the development of innovative and technological processes that allow us to look at the past and start thinking about reducing, reusing and recycling such industrial residues, as well as more sustainable exploitation practices. Although residues, such as waste rock, tailings, slags and fly ashes, often hold impressive residual mineral values and have the potential to be converted to secondary raw materials and mineral resources, we face further challenges to characterize and model waste deposits to realistically assess the prospects for sustainable exploitation. Yet, in order to integrate the mining industry into the future circular economy, it must become the norm to maximize resource use, to reduce the volume for final disposal, and also to mitigate the risk of environmental damage that will be associated with the increasing global demand for raw materials and minerals resources.
The main topics to be discussed in this session address, but are not limited to:
● Characterization and modelling of industrial residue resources
● Environmental assessment of industrial residues
● Geometallurgy applied to industrial residues and secondary raw materials
● Circular economy concepts applied to primary and secondary raw material streams
● Policies in rehabilitation, remediation and management of tailings storage facilities and other industrial residues
● Life cycle Assessment – LCA
Details and abstract submission: https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU21/session/38734
Abstract submission deadline: 13 January 2021