Abstract

Historically, Latin America (LAC) has based development on the exploitation of its abundant natural resources, in particular minerals and metals. Moreover, for the last four decades the primary export model has been followed to describe its reality. In such, mining plays a relevant role because of being an indirect and direct job generator, investment attractor and foreign exchange source. However, the mining sector has a long record of negative impacts on the environment and local communities. Given the increasing importance of mining in the energy transition; is worth asking, how sustainable could be the expansion of mining in the region? Trying to address this question, this paper aimed to identify ongoing circularity practices in the mining sector in LAC by means of literature review. Results show there are extremely few examples of circularity applications, revealing there is an ample potential to adopt circularity, it should be stressed that hindering factors persist. Moreover, it is still to be seen that circularity adoption in the mining sector could contribute to a just energy transition in LAC

Keywords:Circular economy; Mining; LAC; Ongoing circularity practices