Accounting for the environmental impacts of sulfidic tailings storage in the Life Cycle Assessment of copper production: A case study

Most of the existing Life Cycle Assessment studies addressing the environmental impacts of copper production exclude the emissions generated by tailings. This study aims at compiling the life cycle inventory related to the storage of tailings from sulfidic copper ore concentration, in the specific case of a plant located in south-west Poland. The environmental impacts induced by these tailings are compared with the rest of the environmental impacts of copper production. This study demonstrates that, when considering toxicity-related environmental impact categories, the potential impacts related to the storage of tailings in dedicated facilities are a key issue in the life cycle impact assessment of copper concentrate production, and consequently of copper production. Depending on the temporal perspective considered in the study, the disposal of sulfidic tailings induces impacts that may be several orders of magnitude larger than those of copper concentrate production. Yet, when limiting the considered temporal perspective to 100 years, tailings storage has a relatively low contribution to the impacts of concentrate production. The discrepancy between the impacts related to copper concentrate production and those of tailings disposal is highly dependent on both the temporal perspective considered in the LCA study and the actual conditions of tailings management in the future.