Accounting for Water Footprint of an Open-Pit Copper Mine

Kamrul Islam and Shinsuke Murakami
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Kamrul Islam: Department of Systems Innovation, Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan
Shinsuke Murakami: Department of Systems Innovation, Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 22, 1-18

Abstract: Water is a crucial input for any production system, and mining is no exception. A huge amount of water is being used in the various phases of mining activities. In the coming decades, the competition in using a sufficient amount of fresh water will become a major hurdle for the mining industry. Water footprint (WF), an accounting framework for tracking the amount of water used to produce a unit of product, can be useful to the mining companies by quantifying their water resource appropriation and identifying ways to reduce the consumption. In this study, we accounted for the green, blue, and grey water footprint of an open-pit copper mine that is located in Laos. The input–output water flows of the mine are also developed from the inventory of water use. Moreover, we have calculated the uncertainty in the water footprint accounting to check the robustness of the findings. According to the results, the green, blue, and grey WF of the studied mine are 52.04, 988.83, and 69.78 m 3 /tonne of copper concentrate, respectively. After the installation of a passive effluent treatment system in 2013, the calculated grey WF of the mine was 13.64 m 3 /tonne, a fivefold decrease than before. The uncertainty in the footprint ranges between 8% to 11% which shows the robustness of the analysis. Although green WF is ignored by most studies, we suggest incorporating it into the accounting. The responsible share of a supply-chain WF to the total blue WF is about 98%, which is quite huge. Water embedded in the hydroelectricity is mainly responsible for such a huge amount of blue WF. Evidently, the use of electricity from hydropower results in the consumption of a large amount of water in exchange for a reduction in carbon emissions. Thus, the article attempts to demonstrate the escalating importance of WF accounting of this mine.

Keywords: copper mining; water footprint; environmental impact; sustainability; sustainable resource management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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