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Mining and Life on Land
Published in Cristian Parra, Brandon Lewis, Saleem H. Ali, Mining, Materials, and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 2020
The potential for mining to negatively impact the environment varies with commodity, production scale, capital investment, levels of formality, mechanization, and miner education, as well as prevailing political, regulatory, institutional, and physical features of the landscape. However, the global conservation community tends to focus on negative aspects and problems in mining, while too few papers offer pragmatic solutions for the ASM sector. Mineral resources are finite, making the closure of a mining operation inevitable. Planning for closure needs to be a core business practice, and ideally considered in the design phase of an operation – or beginning with the end in mind. (see Figure 15.2; a description of the categories in the Figure are provided in Table 15.1 and ‘Summary of Remediation, Reclamation, Rehabilitation, and Restoration Definitions, Targets, Biodiversity Gains, and End-Goals’).
The impact of empowerment and technology on safety behavior: evidence from mining companies
Published in International Journal of Occupational Safety and Ergonomics, 2022
Paola Ochoa Pacheco, Miguel Pina e Cunha, António Cunha Meneses Abrantes
According to the World Health Organization (WHO) [48], the environmental hazards in small and artisanal mining frequently not only influence degradation and contamination of the general environment but also have implications for the health and well-being of miners, surrounding communities and the global environment. Donoghue [49] highlighted five types of risks: physical, chemical, biological, ergonomic and psychosocial. Physical hazards include rock fall, fires, explosions, mobile equipment accidents, falls from height, entrapment and electrocution. Chemical hazards such as crystalline silica are a serious hazard in mining. Biological hazards refer to diseases such as malaria and dengue fever, which are common in mines, especially in tropical countries. The risks of ergonomic hazards derive from extensive manual handling. Psychosocial hazards include common effects on mining employees in remote locations due to their separation from their families and communities over long periods of time.
Making smart manufacturing smarter – a survey on blockchain technology in Industry 4.0
Published in Enterprise Information Systems, 2021
An entity (or participant) in a blockchain system is any actor involved in a transaction. It can be a user, an organisation, a smart device, an IIoT gateway, a value chain participant, or a software agent. Validating and recording transactions are called mining. The entity which conducts mining is called a miner. Depending on the particular consensus protocol used, the miners compete to validate and record transactions for a financial reward, usually in a form of cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin or Ether. To add a block to the blockchain, the majority of the entities in the blockchain network must agree with the validity of the transactions in that block. This is achieved through a consensus process. There are various consensus protocols in the current implementations of blockchains including Proof of Work (Nakamoto 2009), Proof of Stack (Vasin 2014), Proof of Authority (POA 2017), Proof of Activity (Bentov et al. 2014), Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (Castro and Liskov et al. 1999), Tendermint (Kwon 2014), Federated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (Schwartz, Youngs, and Britto 2014), Measure of Trust (Zyskind, Nathan, and Pentland 2015), just to name a few.
Metals in mine wastes: environmental pollution and soil remediation approaches – a review
Published in Geosystem Engineering, 2021
Taoufik El Rasafi, Mohamed Nouri, Abdelmajid Haddioui
The development of each country in the world is linked to several parameters such as industry, agriculture, and exploiting the soil wealth. With the technological evolution in the world, the need of natural resources is becoming higher and higher. The ore mines benefits is too high but their risks are serious and often fatal. Beside the risks in which the miners are exposed to (floods, landslide, heat, explosion, diseases, or death) and immediate destruction of the ecosystem, the danger of mine sites remains present even after sites exploitation is stopped (Mileusnić et al., 2014). The risk of metals is more serious because it harms the environment (Megharaj, Ramakrishnan, & Venkateswarlu, 2011) and threatens all mankind by polluting the air, the ground water, and the soil by their persistence in the environment for a long time (El Hamiani et al., 2010; Gisbert et al., 2003; Gratão, Prasad, Cardoso, Lea, & Azevedo, 2005). Around the world, mining activities have generated a large polluted land by waste rock and tailings, and these wastes are more dangerous when mine sites are not reclaimed and are abandoned without any special safety treatment or environmental management (Asensio, Vega, Singh, & Covelo, 2013). Millions of the sites are deemed polluted with heavy metals and need to be remediated (Mahar et al., 2016). Several techniques can be used to clean-up the soils, such as the biological and physicochemical approaches (Wuana & Okieimen, 2011)