The European Union is currently addressing challenges related to the supply of essential raw materials that
are used for clean technologies (e.g. lithium for EV batteries, copper for electrification) and everyday life
(e.g. metals for an iPhone). This includes policy initiatives such as the raw materials list and the Critical
Raw Materials Act (European Commission, 2019) which sets 10% of the EU's annual needs for extraction
as a benchmark to be reached by 2030. Reaching this target will require an increase in mining efficiency to
make currently unprofitable mine deposits economically viable.

Most mining occurs in open-pit mines. Waste rock is disposed of in tailing dams which are prone to
disaster, as highlighted by two recent catastrophic failures in Brazil: the Fundao dam failure in 2016 causing
damages of € Billions (Rudorf et al., 2018) and the Brumadinho failure in 2019. They also negatively
impact the landscape. Current pit wall slopes are inefficient compared to topological optimal slopes with the
adoption of optimal slopes in open-pit mines leading to reductions of waste rock of around 25% on average
(Agosti et al., 2021; Utili et al., 2022; Agosti et al., 2023). In addition, the current design of pit walls
is manually performed by geotechnical engineers, requiring often months of onerous trial and error and
several back and forth with mine planner engineers leading to engineering consultancy bills typically of
several €100K per mine.

Mining is responsible for around 8% of the global carbon footprint (Cox et al., 2022) with a very large part
of carbon footprint due to mining activities (drill and blast and material haulage), hence innovations that
reduce the amount of waste rock to be excavated in turn lead to substantial reductions of the overall mine
carbon footprint.

The importance of reducing the land footprint and environmental impact of mines have been recently
highlighted by protests against new large lithium mines in Serbia in 2023 and 2024 (as reported by various
European news outlets BBC, France 24, etc.). Therefore, solutions to reduce mining’s land footprint and the
amount of waste rock produced are urgently needed and will become increasingly important for social
acceptability. Also in Europe open-pit mines tend to be excavated in rural, often deprived areas,
disproportionately affecting low-income populations, especially in southeast Europe, e.g. the Zijin Bor
copper mine in Serbia, Asarel and Ellatzite copper mines in Bulgaria. Reducing the land footprint and
amount of waste rock to be disposed of in the environment would improve the safety and quality of life of
mining communities.

This problem has gone unsolved so far because the efficient design of mine pit walls requires the use of
software which in turn requires the systematic availability of the mine lithology in digital format which has
only become available in the last couple of decades.