Resumen de Life Cycle Assessment for the Primary Raw Materials Extraction Industry

Jan C. Bongaerts, Carsten Drebenstedt

• Since August of 2019, a small team of researchers at Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg have been training students and young researchers on the use of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) with several software packages called UMBERTO+, GaBi and LCA Open access for the purpose of investigating the environmental impacts of processes along their entire Life Cycle. LCA is not new, since researchers started to develop and expand the theoretical background and the methodology already in the early seventies of the last century, except that LCA studies on the extraction, treatment and management of natural resources are not very common. That is why, in Freiberg, our focus is on processes in mining and in mineral processing, especially with respect to minerals and metals with critical relevance for new technological developments, such as decarbonization, the energy transition and the circular economy.