Basic Procedure to Estimate the Accumulated Environmental Damage Caused by Mining Facilities as Exemplified by the Kachkanar Tailing Dump in the Middle Urals

Abstract

Quantifying the accumulated environmental damage caused by economic activity facilities, including those of the mining complex, entailing further selection or development of the environmental measures to restore disturbed natural systems is an urgent problem. There are known techniques to estimate environmental and economic damage, but they are not perfect enough and require significant improvement. The problem is the lack of unified methodological approaches to such estimations, e.g., the already accumulated damage from facilities with exhausted ecological capacity or decommissioned ones. Estimating harm or damage should start with a field survey of the facility causing it, followed by a study of the affected environment with further analysis of field and laboratory data. The study comprises a full-scale survey of a complex hydraulic structure—a tailing dump located in the area of the Kachkanar industrial hub in the Middle Urals and posing a potential technospheric hazard. Some components of this tailing dump have exhausted their ecological capacity, i.e., ceased waste storage activity, and therefore, they cause accumulated environmental damage. The paper proposes an approach and gives some recommendations to develop a procedure for estimating the accumulated environmental damage from mining facilities.