Estimating the escalation of mine tailings disaster risks by using a life cycle assessment approach

Abstract

Abstract Mine tailings should be managed properly to avoid the tailings accident that recorded more than 230 tailings accident worldwide. These accidents caused human and environmental losses. This paper estimates the escalation of mine tailings dam failure using a life cycle assessment (LCA) approach. The LCA functional unit (FU) is defined as 1 tonne of fine coal concentrate slurry generated by flotation cells. SimaPro software was chosen to analyze the material flow data of a mine coal tailings disposal system and focused on impact categories associated with disaster issues including human toxicity, terrestrial eco-toxicity, freshwater eco-toxicity, and marine eco-toxicity. The results showed that the impact escalation of coal mine tailings during 20 years of operation for human toxicity, terrestrial eco-toxicity, freshwater eco-toxicity, and marine eco-toxicity were 13,740 DALY, 27.40 species year, 0.04 species year, and 0.001 species year respectively. These results indicated that a good mine tailings management should be applied by mine site to prevent a human and environmental disaster from mine tailings accident.