Potential environmental pollution from copper metallurgy …
Copper occurs in nature in the form of sulphide and oxide ores, salt minerals and as native copper. It is the second most used non-ferrous metal in industry (Boulamanti and Moya, 2016).According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the 2019 global annual copper extraction was about 20 million tons (Fig. 1).The highest annual …