ABSTRACT
Open-pit mining for metals causes an enormous amount of physical alteration in the landscape. Haul roads, pits, waste-rock impoundments, and processing facilities are a few of the myriad components that mine operators must build during the metal-mining process. The economic costs of this mining include extracting and processing the target minerals and reclaiming the landscape to a desired state or condition. In most US states, a reclamation plan and secured bonding are required prior to the issuance of a mining permit. The focus of the mining industry is, in general, to minimize the projected reclamation costs of a particular operation while meeting the required environmental standards and approvals to receive a mining permit. As a result of this business model, mine operators often overlook the hidden economic, programmatic, and environmental potentials of landscape reclamation. The following study describes a unique case, conducted by the Project for Reclamation Excellence (P-REX), for which the commissioning private mine operator wanted to explore the pre-mining landscape-reclamationdesign potentials of an open-pit copper complex on the Utah-Colorado border.
