Mining Waste and Its Sustainable Management: Advances in Worldwide Research

Abstract

Growing social awareness of the need to adequately treat mining waste in order to protect the environment has led to an increase in the research in this field. The aim of this study was to analyze the dynamics of the research focused on mining waste and its sustainable management on a worldwide scale from 1988 to 2017. A systematic review and a bibliometric analysis of 3577 articles were completed. The results show that research into mining waste has increased, with studies focusing on waste management accounting for almost 40% of the total. The most productive journals in this field were Applied Geochemistry and Science of the Total Environment. The five most productive countries were the United States, Canada, Spain, Australia, and China. Works on the sustainable management of mining waste were in the minority, but it is an area of research that has considerable potential given the growing social awareness of the environmental repercussions of mining activities and the demands for increasingly sustainable practices. The findings of this study could prove useful for studies into mine waste, as they depict a global view of this line of research.

An Analysis of Global Research Trends on Greenhouse Technology: Towards a Sustainable Agriculture

“…The study period selected was 1999 to 2018. Only documents until 2018 have been included so that complete annual periods can be compared [72]. In addition, a search of articles on "agriculture" was also carried out with the same restrictions in order to analyse the relative importance of the research in GT within this general theme.…”

The Sustainable Management of Metals: An Analysis of Global Research

“…The rest of the categories accounted for less than 10% of the total articles. Environmental Science, Engineering, and Chemistry were also among the principle categories of the articles on sustainable management of waste in mining [29]. In recent years, a change in trend has occurred, with technical studies (Engineering and Chemistry) acquiring more relevance and displacing Environmental Science.…”

“…It poses a risk to the environment (for soil, water, and air) and human health due to the toxicity, inflammability, reactivity, corrosiveness, etc. of this waste [27][28][29]. There are different types of waste generated in the mining phase of minerals: Solid, tailings, or slurries [30,31].…”

“…Therefore, in recent years, there has been an increase in publications on sustainability in different fields, particularly regarding environmental resources [35]. Review papers have been conducted to compile this information for sectors, such as energy [36], forest ecosystems [37], water for irrigation [38], mining waste management [29], case studies in sustainable design approaches in the minerals industry [39], and the crushed stone mining sector [40]. Despite the enormous interest in the sustainability of metals, there is no knowledge of previous studies that have quantitatively and systematically analyzed the dynamics of this line of research.…”

Editorial for Special Issue “Towards a Sustainable Management of Mine Wastes: Reprocessing, Reuse, Revalorization, and Repository”

“…Therefore, the developed solutions are generally very site-specific and difficult to apply in other cases. A systematic review paper from the University of Almeria (Spain), based on a bibliometric analysis of a sample of 3577 articles from 1988 to 2017, analyzed the dynamics of research focused on mining wastes and their sustainable management [2]. The results indicated an increase in the number of published papers about mining wastes due to an increase in attention to, and the growing social awareness about, mining wastes.…”