On the second day of the Rumbo a PERUMIN mining event, Ancash edition, Compañía Minera Antamina presented its good practices in water management, including the creation of the Bosque de Huarmey (Huarmey forest), with an area of 170 hectares, irrigated with treated and reused water from this important mining operation.

During her participation, Fabiola Sifuentes, Antamina's environmental planning manager, explained the process of Antamina's water route, which goes from its operation at more than 4,300 meters above sea level and travels through a mining pipeline to the Punta Lobitos port in Huarmey, on the Peruvian coast.

She emphasized that the water used by Antamina is water that comes entirely from rainfall. This is part of its circular economy proposal. "The water used in the concentration process is extracted from the tailings dam; 99% of the water used in the concentrator comes from water recirculation and recycling," she said.

She added that the water with concentrates that arrives at the Punta Lobitos port through the pipeline is filtered, treated and reused to irrigate the Huarmey Forest. In 2001, this was a typical Peruvian coastal desert and today it is considered an environmental asset.

Thanks to Antamina's innovative project to transport ore and reuse water, there is now a large forest with a population of 120,000 trees and a diversity of 14 species.

"This allows the capture of 26,000 tons of carbon per year, with zero discharge to the environment during the whole Punta Lobitos process," she said.

At another time, she indicated that Antamina enrolled two projects in the Water Footprint Program of the National Water Authority (ANA). One of them deals with the reduction of their water footprint stemming from the technological improvements implemented in its camp, and the other is a shared value project for the strengthening of irrigation organizations in the Fortaleza Valley.