Sustainable copper mining: a pathway to emission reduction through renewable energy

Abstract

Due to the importance of copper in battery production, this study was done to determine the environmental impact of copper production, focusing on heap leaching as one of the primary methods to produce copper. To integrate the relevance of sustainable copper mining to batteries, there has been a need to assess other ways to improve the sustainability of copper production. Recently, there has been a shift toward renewable energy resources in the mining industry, especially copper production, but no one has assessed the environmental impacts of this movement. By considering copper production as an example, this study is the first attempt to figure out how this shift can reduce the environmental impacts through life cycle assessment by using SimaPro 9.3 and TRACI 2.1. The results indicated that grid electricity made a significant contribution to stages like electrowinning and ore reduction size (63% or 1.7 tons of total (2.75 tons) CO₂ equivalent). The transition from grid power to wind turbine, solar PV, and geothermal can result in a significant 53%, 38%, and 28% reduction in CO₂ emissions (equals 1,460, 1,046, and 771 kg CO₂ equivalent), respectively. The land use intensity (LUI) values for wind turbines and solar PV were 61.4 and 17.5 m² per ton per year.