Prospective strategies to improve the environmental sustainability of the copper mining industry in Peru

Abstract

The prospective is a tool that allows to generate future scenarios; however, there are some limitations since there are few prospective studies for the copper mining sector. This sector is very important for Peru since it contributes 10% to the national GDP and represents 65.7% of all exports. However, the processing of copper generates large environmental impacts, such as: gaseous emissions, particulate matter, dumping and hazardous solid waste. On the other hand, this is a strategic prospective study with a mixed approach, to determine future sustainable copper mining scenarios and contribute to the improvement of sustainability. In the methodology, the MICMAC was used to determine the key variables, the Mactor and Smic-Prob-Expert software to play the game between actors and define future scenarios respectively. As a consequence, it is suggested the improvement of the fusion process of the mining companies using clean technologies and energies to minimize gas and particulate matter emissions. Finally, 64 scenarios have been generated, of which it was considered that scenario 1 is the best sustainable scenario for the copper mining industry, since it has the highest probability of occurrence with 0.481 and it is where all the hypotheses are fulfilled.