Enhancing environmental impact assessment through life cycle integration for pit lake End-Uses: Insights from three...

Post-mining landscapes, particularly pit lakes, present complex long-term sustainability challenges that extend beyond the operational phase. While early reclamation practices focused on physicochemical stabilization and waste management, there is a growing emphasis on promoting beneficial end-uses and restoring self-sustaining ecosystems. However, Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) often remain limited to local site conditions, overlooking upstream environmental impacts embedded in material and energy use. This study proposes a novel integration of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) into the EIA process (EIA-LCA), offering a structured framework that maps regulatory impact categories to quantifiable LCA midpoint indicators from the ReCiPe-2016 method and broadens environmental profiling by aggregating impacts across three endpoint damage categories. The framework was applied to three representative pit lakes, Island Copper, Scheibe, and Berkeley Pit, to demonstrate how LCA profiles can enhance EIA practices. Results show that ecosystem quality and human health were the most impacted endpoint categories, with terrestrial ecosystems identified as the most vulnerable. At Island Copper, ammonium nitrate production contributed 80 % to global warming potential and 99 % to ozone depletion. At Scheibe Lake, electricity use accounted for over 97 % of impacts across ionizing radiation, eutrophication, and human health categories. Berkeley Pit's quicklime consumption contributed 96 % to global warming impacts. The EIA-LCA framework enables the systematic quantification of the whole chain impacts, improves hotspot identification, and supports data-driven mitigation planning. This framework offers an analytical tool to complement current EIA procedures, integrate life cycle hotspots into significance evaluations, and guide sustainable and resilient decision-making for pit lake end-use planning.