Still Bright’s RACER: A Zero-Waste Copper Extraction Process to Restore Social License *R.D. Allen1 and K.V. Greco1 1Still Bright, Inc., Newark, New Jersey, United States (*Presenting author: rdallen@stillbright.co) ABSTRACT The global copper industry is confronting a dual crisis: exponential demand growth driven by AI infrastructure buildout, broad electrification, and the energy transition, colliding with structural supply constraints rooted in permitting timelines that routinely exceed a decade. The single largest bottleneck is not declining ore grades or deposit complexity, but a mine's social license to operate, as community opposition has become a defining barrier to new copper production. Still Bright's Rapid and Complete Electrochemical Reduction (RACER) technology offers a disruptive solution to this challenge by electrochemically leaching copper sulfide minerals to produce copper with zero sulfur dioxide emissions, preventing the release of toxic byproducts such as arsenic into the environment, and delivering measurable reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and water consumption, thereby providing a processing pathway that can secure community and broader stakeholder buy-in for copper development. RACER can be applied to finished copper concentrate as a drop-in replacement for capital-intensive pyrometallurgical smelting, eliminating freight costs, treatment charges, and refining charges, while its implementation flexibility is unique among processing technologies. Beyond this, RACER can reduce mine cost and environmental impact further by processing upstream feedstocks, specifically rougher concentrate, which eliminates costly, energy-intensive, and water-intensive steps such as regrinding and cleaning flotation, while also recovering the approximately five percent of copper currently lost to tailings in conventional flowsheets. Most significantly, RACER is uniquely capable of selectively recovering copper in the presence of pyrite and other metal sulfides, enabling an entirely new processing paradigm in which all sulfides are first recovered for copper and subsequently processed for other metal sulfides, including a pyrite concentrate. This transforms the fundamental character of mine waste: all valuable metals are recovered, non-acidgenerating (NAG) tailings are produced, and a long-term environmental liability that erodes public trust is eliminated. These NAG tailings also present potential reuse as construction materials, making RACER the first processing technology to credibly enable zero-waste mining. This paper presents Life Cycle Assessment results across three RACER deployment scenarios: processing standard copper concentrate, processing rougher concentrate, and a forward-looking bulk sulfide processing analysis as the pathway to zero-waste mining. KEYWORDS
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