Ecological Footprint And Life Cycle Methods In The Planning Environmental Assessment Of Mine

The booming development of the coal industry results in serious environment problems. Actually, all of the links, including coal mine construction, coal mining, producing, storage and transportation, as well as coal utilization, need consumption of resources and cause discharge of pollutants.As we know, ecological footprint and life cycle assessment are proposed to quantifiably investigate the influence of economic system on environment in the respects of area and quantity. Once both introduced into coal industry, it will provide novel methods to analyze influence of coal system on environment.In the paper, based on ecological footprint and life cycle assessment, HuangBai coal mine and HuangLing coal mine are collected as the targets to analyze influence of coal system on environment. First life cycle system boundary of the coal is defined and resources input and environmental pollutants output in each links are analyzed, and then are converted to ecological productive land area to conduct the further calculation. Finally, the result date are analyzed in three aspects including ecological footprint values, assessing process and land type, further providing a model to analyze and compare the coal environmental influence and giving a scientific strategy for sustainable development of mine.The results show that, the ecological footprints of HuangBai and HuangLing coal mine are 3.6757hm~2 and 1.6359hm~2 per ten thousand tons respectively. The ecological footprints of coal production for HuangBai and HuangLing coal mine are 0.037hm~2 and 0.017hm~2. which illuminates that HuangLing coal mine possesses more sustainable progress with less ecological productive land area than that of HuangBai coal mine. In life cycle link of coal, the ecological footprints in coal mining and producing process are larger. When it comes to land type, water resource land, forest land and construction land all have a significant proportion due to the high consumption of water, wood and electric power.From the analysis of ecological footprint, reduction of material and energy are the effective measures to cut down the consumption and occupation of ecological resource and to control the environmental pressure from the source. Reduction of material and energy and circular economy are all involved in the development of mine, which show a promising way to carry out ecological compensation polices and clean production technology.