Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This literature review contributes to increasing the knowledge on how Chilean copper mining companies deal with water and energy issues at the managerial and operational levels, which is relevant in sustainability research and may support fostering those initiatives within the Chilean territory or in similar contexts. Overall, the manuscript is well structured, and the final discussion is very appropriate, with minor language edits required for publishing. Beyond that, I would like to emphasise more on some aspects that can be improved:

 

Line 26: Consider adding more keywords (e.g. “Environmental Management”, “Water”, “Energy”, “Copper Mining”, “Chile”).

Lines 33-35, Lines 38-40, Lines 44-52: The references that support the statements are outdated. There are more recent and nurtured discussions on the ongoing debate of sustainability in mining. The reviewer encourages the authors to improve the contextualisation of their manuscript by including more recent and pertinent references.

Lines 62-63: I see another problem here. The authors affirm that there is no research on water and energy management issues in Chilean mining but their later analysis indicates the opposite, as observed, for instance in the following references (some of them cited in further sections of the manuscript):

Northey et al. (2013) http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2012.09.027

Chandia et al. (2016) https://doi.org/10.1080/19397038.2016.1148797 (Ref. No. 49)

Ghorbani & Kuan (2017) https://doi.org/10.1080/17480930.2015.1128799 (Ref. No. 17)

Lagos et al. (2018) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.10.290 (Ref. No. 54)

Herrera-León et al. (2019) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2018.11.081 (Ref. No. 50)

Lagos et al. (2020) https://doi.org/10.1007/s13563-020-00227-2 (Ref. No. 51)

Moreno-Leiva et al. (2021) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2021.117298

Campero et al. (2021) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2021.03.004

I invite the authors to rephrase this sentence and perhaps include additional references in the manuscript (at the discretion of the authors).

Line 83: The expression “Not only that, but” seems unnecessary.

Line 87: The expression “sustainability processes” seems inaccurate. Please improve the sentence (perhaps “limiting the effective implementation of sustainability-oriented strategies” or something similar?).

Lines 88-90: “sustainable development” is written twice and the sentence seems redundant (a similar situation occurs in the next sentence). Please rephrase the text.

Line 96: “to overcome those issues”?

Line 98: “sustainability requirements”?

Lines 99-102: I believe you should cite the specific SDGs in parentheses: e.g. “affordable and clean energy (SDG 7)…”.

Lines 142-143: A reference is required to support the sourcing of this information; otherwise, it may be interpreted as the authors’ projections.

Line 150: The year “2014” does not seem appropriate (if this is a projection).

Line 166: This is the first time you mention “Social License to Operate” within the body of the manuscript (apart from the abstract). I suggest writing the full term the first time you introduce it. The same applies to “NCRE” in Line 206.

Line 200: Who are “they”?

Lines 223-228: The authors describe the development of their research in three main sections. I suggest numbering those sections/subsections in parentheses within the paragraph.

Lines 240-241: The sentence seems incomplete. Please review it.

Lines 255-256: It might be convenient for the readers to know more methodological details in order to reproduce the literature search, such as the specific keywords used, the period covered, etc.

Line 276: The word “inaction” seems misplaced.

Lines 342-343: The sentence is unclear. Please, rewrite it.

Lines 364-365: What does “c” mean?

Figure 1: The text above the figure and the arrow are unnecessary, please delete them. Also, I recommend using markers to differentiate data from each country, as some colours are similar. The legend of the y-axis is unclear (what does “c” mean?).

Figure 2: The resolution of the figure is too low. I recommend to the authors develop their figure with better resolution and legends in English.

Line 401: “These challenges are …”

Line 444: “Centinela mine” is repeated.

Line 447: “and the academia” seems misplaced.

Table 2 and Table 3: It is unclear whether some strategies pertain to specific operations or the company as a whole. I recommend adding a column so that the company's name appears in the first column and the name of the operation (or "all operations" when applicable) appears in the second; this will make it possible to visualise more easily the strategies that require greater attention. Another option could be to add a single row with the name of the mining company before each of the corresponding operations. Also, there is an incomplete word in the title of the second column.

Line 596: It seems that “CAEX” was not defined previously, so its meaning is required.

Section 4.4: Considering the reviewed information, I would like to suggest adding a figure or table that shows the current (or most up-to-date) consumption of water and energy and CO2 emissions for each of the mining operations studied, along with the expected reductions (absolute values) based on Chilean copper mining best practices (i.e. proposed environmental management initiatives).

Line 622: This should be section 5.1.

Line 717: This should be section 5.2.

Lines 752-755: The text seems redundant and requires improvement.

Line 764: “multiple” instead of “multiples”.

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

The article answers the questions of the current economic development, which are the subject of discussions in the professional literature.  An overview of the key works on the problem is given. The paper has an interesting focus: sustainability mining in Chile (environmental water and energy supplies). 

The article contains clearly expressed logic, it's ordered.

Several mining companies were examined to review and understand the different types of

Environmental Management Initiatives (EMIs) adopted. 

The data used in this research were from i.e. mining companies' sustainability reports.

Please explain - what exactly kind of report (environmental report, sustainable report, integrated report), do you take into account?

In order to make the article clearer, it is useful to add a diagram for the research process. 

Regards

Reviewer

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report

The presented subject is actual and important for mining industry. The main hot spots are well identified. However, paper is very descriptive without any tables filled with data - therefore I propose to make the paper shorter but to analyze - probably from CSR reports some value about water or energy consumption per 1 Mg of copper or 1 Mg of run of mine. It allow to get the final conclusion about  the increase of the demand for water and energy consumption in the copper mining industry, if it is connected with more difficult geological conditions or lack of implemented solutions. One of interesting study is water-energy nexus (i.e. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261921009946) which is worth mention here. Therefore I propose to find more data and tables and based on this analyze the strategies and activities of companies. As I understand large copper producers were presented which is worth to underline in the text. 

Author Response

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Reviewer 4 Report

The reviewer thanks the authors and editors for the opportunity to review the manuscript.

The manuscript discusses issues related to environmental management in the mining industry in Chile with a focus on water and energy. The issue addressed by the authors is important from the point of view of sustainable production.

The manuscript is a review article. What method of literature review, did the authors use in the manuscript? The authors do not define this method, although the authors describe it.

The reviewer accepts and recommends the article for publication after minor revisions.

Author Response

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Reviewer 5 Report

Dear Authors,

the article is relevant and written at a high scientific level. Nevertheless, I suggest adding Discussion Section with some methodological provisions, as well as reflecting in Conclusion Section some relevant aspects of research, shown in Table 1.

Good luck!

Author Response

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