Track 2: Process Innovation, Circularity and Recovery

• Shared Infrastructure: In districts with clustered liabilities, companies can collaborate on shared processing and disposal facilities (co-disposal). This dramatically decreases CAPEX and improves operational efficiency. • Technological Collaboration: Joint piloting between industry, technology providers, and academia accelerates the adoption of cleaner technologies, enhancing recovery rates and strengthening the local knowledge base. • Strengthened Social License: Involving communities as active partners in planning and monitoring builds trust, transforming potential conflict into shared value through local employment and visible remediation. 4.4 The Next Frontier: Innovations in Processing and Disposal Looking forward, the viability and scope of tailings reprocessing will be amplified by continuous innovation in three key areas: • Processing: Innovations aim to unlock value from complex, low-grade materials. While flotation remains a core technology, selective leaching and In-Situ Recovery (ISR) offer the potential to mitigate physical tailings mining risks, provided that sophisticated hydrogeological control is maintained to prevent groundwater contamination. • Disposal: The industry is shifting toward denser, stable landforms. Filtered tailings produce a stackable "earth-fill" material, maximizing water recovery—critical in the arid Andes—and facilitating progressive closure. Furthermore, co-disposal (blending tailings with waste rock) integrates waste streams into geochemically stable landforms designed for closure from the outset. • Digital Integration: Machine learning applied to large geometallurgical datasets that optimize material blending for process stability. Simultaneously, drones equipped with LiDAR and hyperspectral sensors allow for efficient, frequent monitoring of the physical and chemical performance of the new infrastructure. 5. CONCLUSIONS The reprocessing of legacy tailings represents a unique opportunity to fundamentally shift the paradigm of environmental liability management in Peruvian mining, transforming a sunk cost into a driver for a sustainable circular economy. However, viewing these projects merely as resource recovery operations is insufficient. Success hinges on their execution as holistic engineering endeavors, encompassing the meticulous de-risking of a historical liability, the efficient operation of a complex processing plant, and the design of a stable, permanent landform. This study concludes that the value of reprocessing extends beyond economics to the fundamental preservation of the mining industry's global reputation. Many legacy deposits were designed, constructed, and operated under historical standards that are now considered deficient and unsafe. By physically removing these facilities and redepositing

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