More than 15 million tons of copper tailings are produced in China each year,and the continuous stockpiling of them will cause serious environmental harm,while the recycling treatment can usually make full use of the resources in the copper tailings and reduce the environmental harm to some extents.This article analyzes the environmental impacts of the process of making autoclaved bricks from copper tailings and by-product copper concentrate,iron concentrate and dense medium by life cycle assessment method.The results show that the most important environmental impact of the technical scheme is human toxicity (33 886 kg 1,4-DCB eq./1 000 tons of recycled copper tailings).The environmental load of cement production stage is the highest,and it has the highest contribution among the seven environmental impact categories.The most significant contribution of the key substance is nitrogen oxide,which contributes 94.1%,42.0% and 24.3% to eutrophication,acidification and photochemical pollution respectively.Considering the offset of the products of autoclaved bricks and the by-products of copper concentrate,iron concentrate and dense medium,the recycling of copper tailings can achieve obvious environmental benefits.