Scholarly record

ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENT OF SOME MINING BASED INDUSTRIAL ACTIVITIES

I. Tulbure, M. Palamariu

Abstract

Industrial activities have the direct goal to help increasing the quality of life of the population. Beside positive direct and desired effects of industrial activities these have also negative, undesired and sometimes unthinkable effects on the environment and society. Especially mining based industrial activities have several unwanted impacts on environment, but not only on environment. With the goal of assuring the sustainable development of our human society it is therefore necessary to evaluate industrial processes or generally economic activities not only from economic and technological points of view but from environmental and social ones as well, In the last years the new discipline called Technology Assessment grew up. It started in the United States and then became well known in the Western Europe as well. The discipline bases on several instruments and methods to carry out technology assessment studies. From the universe of known methods and instruments there are some used to carry out environmental assessment of industrial activities. Presently the most discussed one on international level is the life cycle assessment (LCA). In the present paper general notions regarding environmental assessment will be presented, as well as application examples from the industrial practice. The idea is to take into consideration possible negative impacts on the environment because of several mining based industrial activities.

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