Life Cycle Assessment for the Mining and Metallurgical Industries: Issues and Challenges

Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) rating is a key topic of attention by the industries, particularly for the companies trading in the stock exchanges. There is a lack of reliable, robust, and credible ESG rating tools. Mining, mineral processing, and metallurgical technologies are required to be evaluated by consistent and standard methodology to be used by the industries to claim their environmental performances. Life cycle assessment is one such methodology that can be integral to the environmental part of the ESG rating. However, there are several issues that needs attention by the practitioners specific to the mining and metallurgical products and processes. There are several factors such as defining boundary, data inputs, and allocation where multiple metals are produced with significantly different prices, dynamic nature of the changes of the energy sources, particularly, electricity and impact method selection. These make LCA studies challenging which need careful attention by the mining industry experts. Energy, carbon, water, and waste (ECWW) footprint of metals can be a generic simple score card for evaluating the environmental performance of metals, practically in many cases. These indicator results can be fed into the ESG rating tools for company performances in the stock market.