Integrating remote sensing and life cycle assessment to quantify the environmental impacts of copper-silver-gold mining: A case study from Laos

Environmental impacts from the mining is so diverse in nature that it requires different tools to quantify. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is one of the popular tools that can assess the impact of mining activities. Remote sensing (RS) based imagery analysis helps to explore the change in earth surface by providing long-term historical data which is very useful for mining induced environmental impact assessment. Therefore, we used the knowledge of RS based image analysis to analyze the direct footprint of mining that is the land use change. Besides, we also used LCA to quantify the environmental impacts focusing mainly on Global Warming Potential (GWP) and Gross Energy Requirement (GER). The case study site was a copper-gold-silver mine located in Laos, called Phu Kham mine. The RS based image analysis suggests that the land use change due to mining during 2007–2018 was approximately 3.98 km2 whereas the overall intensity of land use change in the same period was about 0.0052515 m2/kg of concentrate. We also analyzed the indirect CO2 emission from vegetation lost by mining. The GER of the mine showed average value for an open-pit copper mine though the CO2 emission was lower mainly due to the use of hydroelectricity. We also tried to quantify the productivity of the mine site. The findings from this study was also compared with existing literature. Though the impact of the mine was lower, there is room for improvement. We have tried to provide a few directions for that as well.