Abstract:
The United Nations minerals are essential for modern living, and mining is still the primary method of their extraction. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sustainability is based on a simple principle: everything that we need for our survival and well-being depends, either directly or indirectly, on our natural environment. Sustainability creates and maintains the conditions under which humans and nature can exist in productive harmony, that permit fulfilling the social, economic and other requirements of present and future generations. Sustainability is important to making sure that we have and will continue to have, water, materials, and resources to protect human health and our environment. At first sign this concepts cannot be applied directly to mineral industry, since we are dealing with nonrenewable materials. Therefore, this concept must be changed, in order to agree with the mineral industry reality. The UN affirms that the main constraints to sustainability in the mining sector derive from the ever-increasing demand for mined resources, the consumption of resources (mostly energy and water) needed to extract and process metals, and the increasing pollution generated by the extraction process. This holds true for both large-scale, often multinational corporate, operations as well as for small-scale or artisanal ventures. In this work it will be presented the developments in sustainable mining and mineral processing in Brazil, with emphasis in the researches on going in Federal University of Goias, Anglo American Phosphate Brazil, Anglo American Niobium Brazil and Vale Fertilizantes.
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