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Life Cycle Assessment for Sustainable Mining addresses sustainable mining issues based on life cycle assessment, providing a thorough guide to implementing LCAs using sustainability metrics. The book details current research on LCA methodologies related to mining, their outcomes, and how to relate sustainable mining concepts in a circular economy. It is an in-depth, foundational reference for developing ideas for technological advancement through designing reduced-emission mining equipment or processes. It includes literature reviews and theoretical concepts of life cycle assessments applied in mining industries, sustainability metrics and problems related to mining and mineral processing industries identified by the life cycle assessment results. This book will aid researchers, students and academics in the field of environmental science, mining engineering and sustainability to see LCA technology outcomes which would be useful for the future development of environmentally-friendly mining processes. Details state-of-the-art life cycle assessment theory and practices applied in the mining and mineral processing industries Includes in-depth, practical case studies outlined with life cycle assessment results to show future pathways for sustainability enhancement Provides fundamental knowledge on how to measure sustainability metrics using life cycle assessment in mining industries

Industrial manufacturing approaches are associated with processing materials that consume a significant amount of thermal energy, termed as industrial process heat. Industrial sectors consume a substantial amount of energy for process heating over a wide range of temperatures (up to 400 °C) from agriculture, HVAC to power plants. However, the intensive industrial application of fossil fuels causes unfavorable environmental effects that cannot be ignored. To address this issue, green energy sources have manifested their potential as economical and pollution-free energy sources. Nevertheless, the adoption of solar industrial process heating systems is still limited due to a lack of knowledge in the design/installation aspects, reluctance to experience the technical/infrastructural changes, low price of fossil fuels, and lack of relative incentives. For successful solar process heat integration in industries, a proper understanding of the associated design factors is essential. This paper comprehensively reviews the integration strategies of solar industrial process heating systems, appraisal of the integration points, different aspects of solar collectors, installed thermal power, and thermal storage volume covering case studies, reports and reviews. The integration aspects of solar process heat, findings, and obstacles of several projects from the literature are also highlighted. Finally, the integration locations of SHIP systems are compared for different industrial sectors to find out the most used integration point for a certain sector and operation. It was found that for the food, beverage, and agriculture sector, 51% of solar process heat integration occurs at the supply level and 27.3% at the process-level.

Solar photovoltaic (PV) systems are widely used to mitigate greenhouse gases (GHG), due to their green renewable nature. However, environmental factors such as bird drops, shade, pollution, etc., accommodation on PV panels surface reduce photons transmission to PV cells, which results in lower energy yield and GHG mitigation potential of PV system. In this study, the PV system’s energy and GHG mitigation potential loss is investigated under environmental stresses. Defects/hotspots caused by the environment on PV panel surface have unknown occurrence frequency, time duration, and intensity and are highly variable from location to location. Therefore, different concentrations of defects are induced in a healthy 12 kWp PV system. Healthy PV system has the potential to avoid the burning of 3427.65 L of gasoline by 16,157.9 kWh green energy production per annum. However, in 1% and 20% defective systems, green energy potential reduces to 15,974.3 and 12,485.6 kWh per annum, respectively. It is equivalent to lesser evasion burning of 3388.70, and 2648.64 L of gasoline, respectively. A timely solution to defective panels can prevent losses in the PV system to ensure optimal performance.

The necessity to increase renewable energy consumption in the industrial, residential, and commercial use is crucial due to increasing use and decreasing reserve of fossil fuels. This paper is focused on the modelling and optimization of solar industrial process heating system using a flat plate collector and evacuated tube collector integrated into lead mining process for 7 different lead miner countries of the world: Australia, Canada, Indonesia, China, Peru, Russia, USA. Comparative analysis among seven miner countries is conducted by considering a few cases based on solar industrial process heating system design. The number of solar collectors installed is then optimized for three different designs of SHIP system in two different locations in Australia. To analyze the reduction potential of environmental burdens, life cycle assessment of lead mining process has been carried out based on the global average dataset. Environmental impact can be greatly reduced in global warming, human toxicity, and fossil fuel scarcity through the solar process heat integration. The evacuated-tube collector based solar process heating system with solar loop heat exchanger would have the highest efficiency and solar fraction over the other types of systems considered. Increasing the number of solar collector installation would result in higher solar fraction and capital cost.