Environmentally sustainable mining: The case of tailings storage facilities

FINANCIAL ACCOUNTING
[Author Name(s), First M. Last, Omit Titles and Degrees]
[Institutional Affiliation(s)]

“Environmentally sustainable mining: The case of tailings storage facilities”
It is undisputable fact that mining is very disruptive in terms of the environmental conservations.
It is usually characterized by the movement of huge amount of rocks and earth some of which
are later processed to get valuable minerals from their ores. The materials which are left behind
or treated as remains after the processing are usually known as tailings. The tailings are
estimated to be averagely ten billions tons per year. It constitutes processing water, acid
drainages and other chemicals which are used in the processing (Schoenberger 2016).
Advantages
This particular paper has comprehensively and adequately addressed the mechanisms or
approaches which handle mining in a way that remediates and contains impacts of the
environment thereby contributing to the conservation of the local population’s livelihood. The
paper has therefore concentrated on the tailing storage facilities-TSF as the main source of
disasters which are related to mining. The outcomes are this compared at the three mines.
Disadvantages
Despite the fact the construction s well as the design of the TSF is regarded as a challenging task
technically, the conclusion of the paper is that the basic causes of failure of TSF are basically
political and never technical. Secondly, the paper has provided a proposal the scientific analysis
to be done socially in all the engineering needs of the projects while ignoring non-engineering
projects
“Using sustainability reporting to assess the environmental footprint of copper mining”

Studies have been conducted and assisted in the estimation of the environmental footprints of the
global primary copper production. Such researches have considered elements like water
intensity, the energy and the emission of the Green House Gases commonly known as the GHG.
The collection of the primary data has been done from the reports of sustainability which are
usually published by the mines which produces copper (Northey, Haque & Mudd 2013).
In this particular paper, the analyzed mines are from South Africa, Peru, Laos, Chile, Argentina,
Papua New Guniea, Finland, Turkey, Canada and finally USA. The energy intensity of energy
was typically found to be 10-70 GJ/ t Cu. The average value was 22.2 GJ/t Cu. The emission
range was found to be 1-9 t CO2-e/t Cu. Also the couple average was at 2.6 t CO2-e/t Cu. This
large variation existed due to the produced form of copper, grade of the ore, source of electrical
and fuel energy. The average water footprint was found to be 70.4 kL/t Cu with kiloliter range of
350 kL/t Cu. The variation in the intensity of the water has been attributed to the inconsistencies
of the reporting.
Advantages
The paper has therefore provided very valuable insights into the sustainable properties of the
reporting in regard to industrial sector like mining of copper.
Disadvantages
The sampling technique used by the paper relied on the principle of averaging which lacks
accuracy.
“Corporate social responsibility and the parameters of dialogue with vulnerable others”