The Circular Economy

4.4. Circular economy in the mining industry

One of the key principles in the CE concept and unsustainable development lexicon is to decouple economic growth from the use of extracted primary resource and to rather link it with the use of secondary raw materials flowing through closed loops, including the mining sector [170]. Nonetheless, key questions still need to be answered are: how fast and to what extent this raw material shift toward secondary materials can be achieved while providing enough resources for an increasing global demand?

In practice, and in the mining field, many scientists and experts strongly believe that societies and economies will continue requiring extracted primary resources, such as metals from mining activities ...