Environmental Science Major Minors in Mineral Resources
Environmental science major Teresa Billick is gaining a unique perspective on sustainability through summer internships with a large mining company. Billick says the skills she is learning are highly transferable and offers thoughtful advice.
Teresa Billick, a native Tucsonan, learned to balance multiple responsibilities before becoming a Wildcat. In addition to studying part-time at Pima Community College, circumstances required her to work as a server and manage her mother’s elder care. When scholarships allowed her to leave her job, she transferred to the U of A as a full-time student.
Billick’s desire to remain in the Southwest and secure a career with both flexibility and stability led her to a major in environmental science with a minor in sustainable mineral resources.
Billick had an internship last summer with Freeport-McMoRan. She spent eight weeks in the environmental department of the company’s Chino Copper Mine in New Mexico. Her main project involved monitoring a reclaimed site where mine tailings had been treated, capped with fresh soil, and re-vegetated.
“Freeport is working hard to give their interns a lot of experience,” she said. In addition to supporting intern projects, the company often took field trips to expose them to multiple aspects of the industry. “They have an excellent program,” she said. “It’s fine-tuned and a real pipeline to employment.”
Billick will intern with Freeport again this summer. She has been assigned to the company’s molybdenum processing facility in Fort Madison, Iowa, where the copper byproduct is repurposed into chemicals used in electronics and manufacturing. Even if she does not pursue a long-term career in mining, gaining skills such as environmental oversight of manufacturing plants, she says, is valuable and highly transferable.
Social License in Mining
Attending the U of A’s first annual International Mining Social License Summit in April 2024 reinforced Billick’s belief that transparency and public engagement are essential.
“It’s a fact that mining caused a lot of damage in the past,” she says. “But we’re in a different time now, and new technologies can dramatically reduce harm. We need to communicate that.”
Billick believes general awareness of the extent to which human activity can harm the environment has changed the way companies think. Still, she says, government regulation is necessary. “No company is going to do something that costs their shareholders without good reason.
Billick has suggestions for all stakeholders:
- Continue to support mining research.
- Host community forums to discuss honest questions. “For example,” she says, “What roles do mines play in Arizona? How can the community and the mine co-exist in the future? Transparency and social license are so important,”
- Contract with local universities to provide up-skilling certification programs for current mine laborers faced with job automation. She says this could provide job security for the existing workforce while encouraging them to embrace new technologies.
- Expand mining education beyond schools to reach a broader audience. People see the yard signs saying, “No mining”, and understand the opposition side, but they don’t always see the potential benefits. People tend to think mining projects are all-or-nothing fights between jobs and the environment, but it doesn’t have to be that.”