For example, for several of the cleanup projects described above, work was well under way before legally enforceable administrative agreements were signed with EPA to oversee the work.
Fortunately, EPA technical representatives were able to conduct site inspection even without legal agreements. As mentioned above, an aggressive community relations program has been an integral part of the cleanup program. Kennecott has encouraged local community leaders, citizen groups, labor unions, professional organizations, environmental groups, and the regulators themselves to tour the operations and the cleanup projects to see the remarkable progress being made.
This tour program has been very successful, and press coverage of the cleanup projects has been very positive. As another example of the success of the community relations program, public meetings held to discuss possible solutions to a groundwater contamination problem generated essentially no adverse publicity, and comments from the public about Kennecott's environmental approach were favorable.
Kennecott had been negotiating a ground-breaking legal agreement with EPA that would have governed the comprehensive cleanup program at Utah Copper. The agreement would have deferred EPA's consideration of listing the Utah Copper facility on the National Priorities Superfund List in exchange for Kennecott agreeing to do at least all of the work that would have been required had Utah Copper been listed.
EPA recently elected to discontinue negotiations on this agreement. EPA has now begun actions to place Kennecott on the Superfund list. Kennecott will resist this action and will simultaneously continue its waste cleanup activities. Good working relationships that have been established between Kennecott and EPA's technical representatives are expected to continue, even if an adversarial position develops over legal terms. The cleanup will be virtually complete by , which is when the modernized smelter is expected to reach full production.
The expression "best contemporary practice" means the best available and proven technology appropriate to the situation, taking into account economic and environmental factors. The technology is to be supported by design, construction, operating, maintenance, and management methods of the best available quality and by active assessment and training programs. Mineral production takes place in stages.
Both the principal effects of mining on the environment and the important issues for public policy in this area are perhaps best introduced within the context of this production stages. Before a mineral deposit can be mined, it must be discovered and its economic and technical viability demonstrated, this is the exploration stage. The environmental disruption caused by exploration tends to be localized and minor. Most damage that does occur can be remediated relatively easily.
During initial assessment of a region's geologic potential, explorationists rely heavily on satellite images, airborne geophysical surveys, and large-scale geologic maps to study large areas of land—hundreds or even thousands of square kilometers. Environmental impacts are essentially nil. Explorationists then narrow the focus of their search to smaller, more promising.
Eggert, ed. Washington, D. Typical activities include geologic mapping, geochemical sampling, and surface geophysical surveying, which are carried out on the ground without large-scale equipment. Although the environment is affected by these activities, the impacts are minor. Only in the subsequent, subsurface examination of still smaller areas is there any appreciable environmental impacts—from drilling, trenching bulldozing a trench to examine near-surface rocks , and the associated road building to provide access for drill rigs and bulldozers.
Such impacts can be mitigated, albeit at a cost, by reclaiming drill sites and trenches and by revegetating roads. In some instances, the need for roads in remote areas has been eliminated by using helicopters to deliver drilling equipment. For every one hundred or so mineral deposits that are discovered and evaluated in detail during exploration, fewer than ten on average will be prepared for production during the second stage of mineral production, mine development.
During development, mining companies design and construct mining and beneficiation facilities, arrange for financing, provide for infrastructure, and develop marketing strategies, among other activities. The environmental impacts of these activities are more significant than those resulting from exploration but much less than those of mineral production itself. Two types of public policy are critical during mineral exploration and mine development.
The first type of public policy consists of land use rules governing whether land is available for exploration and development. The second type, applicable on those lands available for mineral activities, consists of environmental rules governing permits, environmental impact assessments, and other preproduction activities and approvals that are necessary to proceed from exploration to mine development and mining—in short, the process of environmental compliance prior to mining.
Land-use rules are important because, before mining companies can undertake mineral exploration and development, they need access to prospective mineralized lands. To be sure, in situations where mineral rights are privately held, land access is gained through negotiation between interested private parties.
But for most lands worldwide, mineral rights are held by governments. Explorers or miners typically gain access to these lands in one of three ways: negotiation with a government agency, competitive bidding, and—in a few cases, such as in the United States—claim staking that is, claiming the right to explore on a first-come, first-served basis when lands are considered open for exploration unless they are specifically declared off-limits, such as for national parks or wilderness areas.
Existing land-use policies have placed large tracts of land off-limits to mineral exploration and development in a number of countries, including Australia, Canada, and the United States. The desire to avoid the environmental damages of mining is an important reason behind these withdrawals of land from mineral activities. Public policies in the second category, rules governing the preproduction process of complying with environmental rules, take a number of forms.
The most. Mining companies typically are required to obtain environmental permits signifying government approval of various aspects of their mine plans, including those for reclamation, waste disposal, sewage treatment, drinking water, and construction of dams and other impoundments.
Companies also often have to carry out detailed assessments of the environmental impacts of proposed mineral development, which in turn are used by governments in deciding whether to permit mine development at all. Environmental permits and assessments are important to mining companies because they increase the time, costs, and risks associated with bringing a mine into production.
Costs may rise because of expenditures on permitting and environmental assessment and on implementing changes in project design that the compliance process may require. Risks rise, from the perspective of the firm prior to mining, in the sense that governments may decide not to allow mine development after companies have spent significant sums of money on exploration. Once a mineral deposit has been discovered and developed, it is ready for the next stages in the production process: mining and beneficiation.
During mining, metal-bearing rock called ore is extracted from underground or surface mines. Metal concentrations in ore vary greatly, from less than 1 percent by weight for most gold deposits to over 60 percent for some iron ore deposits; most metallic mineral deposits have ore grades in the range of 1—5 percent by weight. Beneficiation, sometimes called milling, usually occurs at the mine site.
During this stage, ore is processed or upgraded into concentrates, which will be processed still further, usually in a smelter or refinery. Mining and beneficiation can have a variety of environmental effects. The environmental damage is largely aesthetic. To put the problem of potentially unsightly land into perspective, consider the study by Johnson and Paone They estimated that over the fifty-year period —, only 0.
Coal mining represented about half of this land, with mining of nonmetallic minerals accounting for about two-fifths and of metallic minerals about one-tenth. Some 47 percent of the land affected by mining and waste disposal had been reclaimed. The figures of course would vary considerably from country to country, but the essential point is that only a relatively small amount of land is involved in mining and associated waste disposal.
Mining activities use much less land than agricultural production, urban development, logging and forestry, and national parks and wilderness areas. Mining and beneficiation account for significant fractions of the total amount of solid waste generated each year.
Very crude estimates compiled by the United Nations Environment Programme indicate that mining activities, apparently in this case including oil and gas production and coal mining, account for about three-quarters of the solid wastes generated annually in Canada, one-third in the United States, one-tenth in the European Community, and one-twentieth in Japan.
The substantial differences reflect differences in the size of the extractive industries relative to the total economies in these countries. More detailed data for the United States suggest that non-coal mining accounts for about one-seventh of the solid waste generated annually that is considered nonhazardous, while coal mining accounts for less than a hundredth of such wastes. Manufacturing, on the other hand, generates more than half of nonhazardous solid wastes Office of Technology Assessment, These volumes of waste, however, are not good proxies for the amount of actual environmental damage caused by mining and beneficiation.
For this point to be clear, it is necessary to know more about the three important types of solid waste generated by mining and beneficiation. Overburden is soil and rock removed to gain access to a mineral deposit prior to surface mining. Waste rock is separated from ore during mining. Overburden and waste rock typically are deposited adjacent to a mine or in a mine, in the case of waste rock from underground mining. Tailings are the fine waste particles that are produced during the beneficiation of ore and typically suspended in water.
Tailings from surface mines usually are deposited in a tailings or settling pond, while those from underground mines are deposited in the mine itself. In a few countries, tailings can be deposited directly into the environment. The amount of solid waste generated during mining and beneficiation essentially is determined by, first, the type of mine and, second, the ore grade, or concentration of metal in the rock that will be beneficiated.
The type of mine is important because underground mines generate no overburden, and mining techniques are selective enough to extract ore with only small amounts of waste rock. Surface mines, on the other hand, usually generate more than twice as much overburden and waste rock as ore.
As an example, for underground copper, gold, silver, and uranium mines in the United States, the ratio of overburden and waste rock to ore, is on the order of 0. For surface mines, the ratios range from to on average EPA, ; based on data from the U. Bureau of Mines. Ore grade, the second determinant, governs the quantity of tailings generated by a beneficiation plant. An operation with ore grading 1 percent by weight, for example, will generate ninety-nine pounds of tailings for every pound of metal, assuming complete metal recovery.
Actual recovery rates usually range between 90 and percent, resulting in somewhat smaller volumes of tailings. By themselves, the solid wastes of metal mining and beneficiation would cause little environmental damage, except aesthetically.
But when surface and. When water interacts in an oxidizing environment with the sulfide minerals typical of most metal mines, sulfuric acid is created. Metals then are dissolved in the resulting acidic water.
Acid mine drainage can contaminate drinking water and affect aquatic and plant life if it gets into surface or ground waters.
The nature and extent of actual environmental damage caused by solid mine wastes and, in turn, acid mine drainage vary enormously from case to case, depending on several factors. The type of mineral deposit being mined is important: sulfide-poor deposits, for example, generate less of the sulfur needed to create sulfuric acid than sulfide-rich deposits, and high-grade deposits will have fewer tailing per unit recovered metal than low-grade deposits.
Mining and beneficiation techniques are important: underground mining, a noted above, creates much smaller volumes of waste per unit of metal than does surface mining, and the higher the recovery rate during beneficiation, the smaller the amount of tailings created. Climate is important: in arid regions, there is little of the water necessary to create acid mine drainage.
Location and population density are important: acid mine drainage that enters streams feeding into sources of human drinking water not only destroys fish and wildlife habitats, but also damages human health. Finally, the environmental management practices of mining companies are important: waste piles that are revegetated or in some other way sealed, for example, are much less likely to be accessible to the water necessary to create sulfuric acid. Other environmental problems may be associated with mental mining and beneficiation.
Another type of water contamination is waste-water from beneficiation plants, which may contain ore material. Air pollution is limited largely to airborne dust. Underground mining may lead subsidence. A major area not dealt with in this excerpts is the working environment, that is, worker health and safety; readers interested in this issue are referred to Section 11 of Hartman, The key issues for environmental policy affecting ongoing mining and beneficiation are for the most part the same as those affecting other economic activities: What should be the standards for environmental quality and how should they be determined?
What policy tools—for example, direct regulation or economic incentives—are best suited for meeting these standards? How should rules be enforced? Two aspects of mining and beneficiation noted above, however, bear on these more general questions. First, the extent to which the amount of solid waste generated from mining and beneficiation can be reduced has significant limits. This seepage is called acid mine drainage. Acid mine drainage is still seeping from mines in Europe that were worked by Romans prior to A.
Chemicals used to separate valuable metals and minerals from ore also may leak into streams, rivers, and groundwater. Some of these chemicals, such as mercury, persist in the environment for decades.
Although no longer used in mining, mercury continues to contaminate waterways. Cyanide, which is widely used in modern gold mining, is another potentially deadly chemical that can get into water supplies.
Mining can deplete surface and groundwater supplies. Groundwater withdrawals may damage or destroy streamside habitat many miles from the actual mine site. Hundreds of tons of rock are unearthed, moved, and crushed in mining operations significantly increasing the amount of dust and particulates in the air.
In addition, mine tailings, which may contain finely ground and even toxic waste, can become airborne. This air pollution can directly affect human health. Mining can cause serious human health problems. Statistical studies suggest linkage between mining pollution and human disease and mortality. For example:. Small mine size is associated with lung function abnormality and pneumoconiosis among underground coal miners in Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia.
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