SUSTAINABLE MINERAL PRODUCTION
Figure 1 - 2020 mineral baby,
www.MineralsEducationCoalition.org.
Coalition encourages the widespread copying and distribution of each year’s mineral baby as long as the copyright and web address are retained.
Natural resource deposits are depletable The concept of sustainable development has been, and still
is, subject to criticism, including the question of what is to be sustained in sustainable development. “The production of mineral resources and fossil fuels would seem to be activi- ties that cannot, by definition, be sustainable, but extractive industries provide necessary contributions to society” (Wessel, 2016). The depletability of natural resource deposits is a fact of nature. Deposits are limited in size. In addition to the limits on absolute deposit or occurrence size, various factors of geol- ogy, deposit delineation techniques, extraction and processing technologies, and extraction costs combine to prevent complete (100%) extraction of the contained valuable mineral(s) (the economically recoverable metal-bearing and other minerals) in a deposit. This is true regardless of whether the valuable resource comprises 100% of the core of a deposit, for example, a paper-grade marble or dimension stone granite, or a few parts per million (grams per tonne) in the case of gold and platinum group metal deposits. The mine life of a deposit depends on its size, the grade (i.e. the percentage of valuable mineral(s) in the deposit, the cut-off grade (the grade at which extraction becomes unprofitable), and the extraction rate. Some deposits are mined out within a few years while others may last decades.
Natural resource deposits are not uniformly distributed
Natural resource deposits are unevenly scattered around the world. Some areas are mineral rich, for example the south- ern part of the Katanga Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which contains the majority of the world’s cobalt
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Oct.Nov.Dec 2020
production and significant copper resources. The world’s major platinum group metal deposits are in South Africa, Russia, and Zimbabwe with much smaller occurrences in the Stillwater Complex of southcentral Montana and various parts of Ontario and Quebec. The world’s major iron deposits are in the older (≈2+ billion-year-old) cratons of the globe. Major deposits of phosphates, a critical fertilizer (the P of N-K-P of fertilizer composition), occur in central Florida (increasingly depleted) and in a trend across northern Africa from Morocco to Saudi Arabia. The rare earth elements have traditionally come from either the Mountain Pass deposit in southern California or China. Rare earth element deposits are not so rare, but most are low grade and the most common rare earth
element-containing mineral is monazite (Ce, La, Y, Th)(PO4, SiO4). Thorium (Th) is radioactive, creating an environmental hazard when processed for the rare earth elements. The La in
monazite’s formula stands for the lanthanide series rare-earth elements, which, except for cerium, are very difficult to chemi- cally separate and which make individual rare earth element oxides expensive to recover. Natural resource deposits occur where they are and not necessarily in areas deemed less envi- ronmentally sensitive or in less socially desirable locations.
Balancing resource recovery with environmental and social impact mitigation
The extraction of a natural resource deposit produces one or more holes in the ground of widely varying size. The clay pits of Hopi and other Native American potters may be fairly small as were the somewhat larger Native American flint quarries. In sharp contrast are the giant iron mines of northern Minnesota and Michigan or the porphyry copper mines including such giants as the Bingham Canyon Mine west of Salt Lake City, UT or the Chuquicamata Mine complex of northern Chile. In addition to the holes and piles of waste rock, mineral process-
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