CSIRO Mineral Resources in cooperation with mining industry equipment and software company Outotec completed a workshop on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for mining, mineral and metal industries in Perth and in Melbourne in February.
Jonathan Law and Dr Chris Vernon from CSIRO welcomed the participants and briefed them on the key sustainability research areas in Mineral Resources. Prof Markus Reuter from Helmholtz-Institute Freiberg was a key speaker with Dr Nawshad Haque from CSIRO and Dr Antti Roine from Outotec.
The workshop discussed the key challenges for undertaking LCA for minerals and metals. An idea to develop the life cycle inventory database for the mineral industry (AusMinLCI) under a larger scheme of AusLCI was proposed with CSIRO leadership in consultation with industry partners.
Representatives from the Australian Life Cycle Assessment Society (Tim Grant), Life Cycle Society of NZ, Edge Environment (Jonas Bengtsson), SimaPro (Tim Grant) and GaBi LCA software agents thinkstep (Jeff Vickers), and Curtin University presented on various aspects of LCA application for the mining industry and data quality issues.
About seventy participants included those from CSIRO, Monash University, Swinburne University, Outotec, GNS Science NZ, Xperential Scientific, Curtin University, TZMI International, Pacific Aluminium, Doosan Heavy Industries (Korea) and BHP Nickel and others. A number of consultants from New Zealand, Canada and Australia attended this event.
Outotec also offered courses on using various modules of HSC Chemistry 9 Software at CSIRO and Outotec offices in Australia. This included basic, pyrometallurgy, hydrometallurgy and mineral processing. HSC Chemistry 9 software can generate input data for mineral processing and metal production that can be used in LCA software for producing results of the environmental footprints of a product or process.
For further information contact Nawshad.Haque@csiro.au.