Evaluating Water Management Practice for Sustainable Mining

Water

Xiangfeng Zhang¹  Lei Gao³  Damian Barrett² 

[1]Department of Automation, Shanghai Dianji University, Shanghai 200240, China

[2] E-Mail:

[3]CSIRO Water for a Healthy Country National Research Flagship, CSIRO Land and Water, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 2601, Australia

[4] E-Mails:

[5]Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) Water for a Healthy Country National Research Flagship, CSIRO Land and Water, PMB 2, Waite Road, Glen Osmond, South Australia 5064, Australia

关键词: mine water management;    multi-criteria evaluation;    sustainable mining;    analytic hierarchy process (AHP);    fuzzy TOPSIS;    sustainability;    decision-making;   

DOI  :  10.3390/w6020414

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

To move towards sustainable development, the mining industry needs to identify better mine water management practices for reducing raw water use, increasing water use efficiency, and eliminating environmental impacts in a precondition of securing mining production. However, the selection of optimal mine water management practices is technically challenging due to the lack of scientific tools to comprehensively evaluate management options against a set of conflicting criteria. This work has provided a solution to aid the identification of more sustainable mine water management practices. The solution includes a conceptual framework for forming a decision hierarchy; an evaluation method for assessing mine water management practices; and a sensitivity analysis in view of different preferences of stakeholders or managers. The solution is applied to a case study of the evaluation of sustainable water management practices in 16 mines located in the Bowen Basin in Queensland, Australia. The evaluation results illustrate the usefulness of the proposed solution. A sensitivity analysis is performed according to preference weights of stakeholders or managers. Some measures are provided for assessing sensitivity of strategy ranking outcomes if the weight of an indicator changes. Finally, some advice is given to improve the mine water management in some mines.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2014 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.