MINERAL EXTRACTION WASTES: CURRENT STATUS AND EXISTING WAYS OF REDUCING THEIR ACCUMULATION

Abstract

In the process of extraction and processing of minerals, waste is always generated, and secondary products can accumulate. The waste of the mining and processing industry accounts for the largest amount of waste among all existing branches of human economic activity. The most rational area of application of by-products of mining enterprises is the industry of non-metallic building materials. This is mainly due to their relative environmental safety. Man-made deposits, as the enrichment technology and the corresponding equipment are improved, already have and may in the near future acquire significant industrial importance. Taking into account their negative impact on the environmental where they are located and the lack of free territories and funds for the construction of new dumps and tailings storage facilities, it can be argued that solving issues related to the development of man-made deposits is becoming particularly relevant. Considering this, one of the possible fields of their use is environmental technologies. Ecological engineering allows the introduction of biological and chemical methods and systems that exist in nature for the study and design of engineering systems and modern approaches and technologies. Industrial ecology (IE) is the study of material and energy flows through industrial systems. The global industrial economy can be modelled as a network of industrial processes that extract resources from the Earth and transform those resources into products and services which can be bought and sold to meet the needs of humanity. Industrial ecology seeks to quantify the material flows and document the industrial processes that make modern society function. Industrial ecologists are often concerned with the impacts that industrial activities have on the environment, with use of the planet's supply of natural resources, and with problems of waste disposal. Industrial ecology is a young but growing multidisciplinary field of research which combines aspects of engineering, economics, sociology, toxicology and the natural sciences. Industrial ecology has been defined as a "systems-based, multidisciplinary discourse that seeks to understand emergent behavior of complex integrated human/natural systems". The field approaches issues of sustainability by examining problems from multiple perspectives, usually involving aspects of sociology, the environment, economy and technology. The name comes from the idea that the analogy of natural systems should be used as an aid in understanding how to design sustainable industrial systems.