ECOserve : Quarrying/production

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Phase 2: Quarrying and production

Once operative, the quarrying process incorporates a series of sub-activities to be considered also from an environmental point of view:

Aggregate quarry

Potential impact of quarrying activities on external environment may be:

Technology for preventing or reducing pollution in quarrying is mostly state-of-the-art, although often insufficiently applied.

Potential environmental impacts of extracting and transporting aggregates should be identified in each case, and methods to avoid or minimize the impact should be determined. This could e.g. incorporate alternative means of transport.
Dust control may be executed by careful location of equipment and stockpiles, dust collection on rigs, reducing the drop height of dusty materials, protection with telescopic chutes, skirts and/or covers, water fog spraying, covering of truck loads, keeping trucks clean (washing), water/chemical applications on roads and rubble piles, buffer zones, windbreaks, and finally by monitoring dust - and quartz - in breathed air (workers).

Mass balance can be improved by:

Use of novel crushing and sorting technology that minimises surplus sizes. New and improved technologies are available to crush smaller aggregate sizes into cubical shape without excess fines generating. New dry classifying technologies are also available to make pre-designed grading curves for manufactured sand and fillers.
By establishing integrated plants with on-site down-stream solutions, a lot of excess mass transport can be avoided. This will also result in higher consumption of all on-site produced aggregate sizes - thus minimising the need for depositing surplus sizes. Integrated solutions will also be a pre-requisite for a future possible development of under-ground solutions in densely populated areas.
It is also essential that production be balanced versus market, to minimize the production of non-marketable sizes.