Oct 22 2015
Two engineers at the School of Mining and Energy Engineering at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) have improved the technique known as Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) for the specific case of mining exploitation.
The new management tool allows us, amongst others, to estimate the temporal evolution of relative indicators to environmental impact to exploitations, which is something that was not available to such methods before. This tool will allow us to have more information in order to adopt proportional mitigation measures to potential environmental impacts at any moment and all this depending on the location of the developed project.
The exploitation of mining resources is an essential activity for the development of modern society. In fact, life quality and development of our society depend on the intense and continuous production of a wide and varied range of raw materials. These production requirements along with the need to ensure the protection levels of the environment make it necessary that mining exploitation is managed under diverse points of view but taking account sustainability.
In order to ensure an effective protection of the environment, there exist a wide range of techniques and tools including the Environmental Impact Assessment which is one of the most accepted and used by both the industry and regulative organisms. This tool has numerous advantages for a suitable management of environmental impacts caused by a project. However, it also has disadvantages since this tool uses subjective criteria and indicators. For this reason and under certain conditions, it is hard to make comparison among mining exploitations, for example when calculating the potential environmental impacts of each one.
The methodology developed by Jorge Castilla Gómez and Juan Herrera Herbert, doctors of mining engineering at UPM, aims to improve the process of Environmental Impact Assessment when analyzing the particular case of mining exploitations by setting a procedure based on the use of comparative and quantifiable models. These models have to be applicable to the process of environmental management of one or various exploitations providing greater information to the management of accumulative impacts in a particular region.
In addition, this methodology is also focused on the evolution of environmental impacts of mining exploitations over time, this issue is not covered by other traditional methods that are usually used. Besides, this will allow us to have more information to adopt proportional mitigation measures to potential environmental impacts at any time and all this depending on the location of the developed project.
This work provides a useful tool from the planning phase of the mining project and during the development and exploitation phases. It can also be used to support regulative organisms by establishing a common framework to carry out mining projects with an effective protection of the environment at regional level.
Source: http://www.upm.es/