Recultivation of mining waste dumps - Environmental aspects

With the 100 M tons of coal produced per year Poland is the biggest European producer of hard coal. Around 85% of the produced coal is used for direct energy production, almost whole rest is used for indirect energy production (though processes of coal coking). The side effect of coal production is large quantity of waste. Majority of them is recycled during production process but still large fraction is usually dumped. The large quantities of valuable materials are stored in mining dumps. In recent years reclamation of them is being undertaken. The environmental impact of dump reclamation processes and the final results of such processes are described in the paper. The analysis is based on LCA approach.