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(50-12) Life cycle inventory methodology for hydrometallurgical ore treatment. Douni, Iliana1, Taxiarchou, Maria1, Paspaliaris, Ioannis*,1, 1 National Technical University of Athens, Zografos, Greece ABSTRACT- Life Cycle Assessment is becoming a widely acceptable methodology that quantifies and evaluates the environmental impacts of products, processes or services. Up to now, LCA has mainly been applied to assess the life cycle of products. Recently, the application of LCA methodology to process design, selection and optimisation has become equally important. In this paper the LCA inventory methodology is applied to mineral processing industry in order to evaluate the environmental performance of different ore processing options. The developed inventory involves all the physical and chemical processes included in hydrometallurgical production of copper, gold, nickel, lead and zinc. The development of this inventory has a generic approach and is based on the appropriate modelling of the unit operations involved in each process flowsheet. For each metal, a specific group of scenarios has been developed taking into account the different processing options for the alternative ore types, as the ore type, in most cases, designates the mineral processing route. Furthermore, each scenario includes all the alternative functional units that can be used in each process of the scenario. The developed system calculates the process variables required to perform the Life Cycle Assessment. The system has been structured in such a way to provide a flexible enviroment for the evaluation of different technological solutions of a metal production based on LCA methodology. An example of the application of the developed inventory in the case of hyrometallurgical production of copper is also presented. Key words: Life Cycle Assessment, Hydrometallurgy, Process design, Methodology |
