Comminution process modelling from a sustainability perspective

Paper in proceedings, 2018

Mining is one of the largest industries in the world and contributes largely to the environmental emissions as well as gross domestic product growth for many countries. The demand for sustainability in the industry is continuously increasing with efforts such life cycle assessment, circular economy and even fairtrade to improve the entire supply chain from different perspectives. The process of comminution is subjected to different conditions and will influence the performance of the process and utilization of resources.

In this paper the aim is to simulate comminution circuit from an operational perspective with dynamic simulations to evaluate process performance and environmental impacts and to compare it to a cradle-to-gate process. By integrating the environmental impacts into the dynamic process simulations, a higher simulation fidelity can be achieved to provide an extended operational and environmental perspective to the process assessment.