ENBUS406 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Industrial Ecology, Kilogram, Crushed Stone
15 Sep 2016
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The most abundant ele(cid:373)e(cid:374)ts i(cid:374) the earth"s crust are oxygen and silicon, and the top 8 elements account for 98. 5% of the total. There is a large gold, silver, and lead mine in eureka, nevada. It"s a concentration of these minerals that is greater than elsewhere, and so a mine is dug and minerals extracted for profit. They are taken out of a pit mine by trucks, to a processing building, and the leftovers are either called tailings or overburden. The concentration of these elements in the ore has been evaluated to be high enough to be profitable in the current state of the mining market. If copper had to be extracted from an ore equal to its average concentration (which it doesn"t, we can extract it from ore with less or more than the average concentration) then it would cost about per kilogram. In reality, it costs just under per kilogram.
