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The purpose of this focus review is to provide a comprehensive overview of the direct synthesis of five-membered cyclic carbonates via oxidative carboxylation of the corresponding olefins and carbon dioxide with particular attention on the mechanistic features of the reactions. The review is divided into two main sections. The first section is a discussion of the single-step reactions, while the second consists of an overview of one-pot, two-step sequential reactions.

As with other engineering design tasks, mine design involves setting design objectives and constraints (the feasible solution space) and finding the optimal design alternative. Mine engineers often struggle to incorporate the preferences of local community members into their evaluation of mine design alternatives because the mining literature lacks tools to quantify such risks during mine planning. This paper presents an approach to evaluate community acceptance (i.e., community preferences for the alternatives) using discrete choice models and decision-based design during mine planning. Using discrete choice models and a rigorous framework, engineers can estimate the cost of social risks as a function of the probability that individuals in the host community will prefer a particular design alternative. They can then estimate the overall utility of a particular design alternative to the project proponents. This paper illustrates the proposed approach with a strategic mine planning exercise for a gold mine. The framework can be a useful tool for designing mines for sustainability, if combined with effective community engagement and management’s commitment to creating shared value.

This paper is concerned with the nonlinear performance of the grouted liner with a crown void under a concentrated load. The liner consists of three deformed shapes based on three void size...

The literature on mining community preferences for mineral development, which is the basis for engaging local communities, mainly focuses on rural communities, and may not provide enough insight into an urban community's needs, concerns, and preferences. To bridge this gap, this work uses Salt Lake City, Utah in the United States of America (USA) as a case study to understand an urban population's preferences for mineral resource development. The work considered 16 mining project attributes and four demographic factors (gender, age, education, and income), which have previously been identified as important for explaining individual preferences for mining projects in the USA. The study recruited 628 participants from Salt Lake City to participate in a survey and used a discrete choice model to examine their preferences. The results show that 15 of the 16 attributes have statistically significant influence on the preferences of these urban dwellers. The probability of the respondents preferring mineral development increases with job opportunities, availability of independent information, income increase, infrastructure improvement, and mine buffer but decreases with noise pollution, air pollution, increase in housing costs, and crime increase. Older, male respondents with higher levels of income and education are more likely to prefer mineral development. The issues that drive the preferences of these urban dwellers are generally similar to those of rural dwellers. However, the study finds that job and housing cost are more important for our urban dwellers than for rural dwellers in other studies. The results suggests that our respondents prefer mines with longer lives.

This study examined whether individual preferences for mining projects vary with cultural, regulatory, socio-economic, and historical context. The same discrete choice experiment was conducted in the United States and China to: (1) identify differences in the relative importance of various mining project attributes in predicting individual preferences between urban dwellers in the United States and China; (2) evaluate differences in the significance of demographic factors in explaining individual preferences in the United States and China; and (3) evaluate differences in the economic value individuals place on non-economic benefits/impacts of mineral development. The results show that the relative importance of 14 out of the 16 mining project attributes examined, in explaining individual preferences, differ between the two countries. We posit that these differences are due to the different socio-economic and cultural contexts. Also, the work shows that how demographics explain individual preferences differ between the United States and China (e.g., gender and household income have opposite effects on preferences within the two populations). The work also shows that American and Chinese respondents’ willingness-to-pay for the negative impacts of mineral development differs. These results show that context is important when assessing individual preferences.

The purpose of this focus review is to provide a comprehensive overview of the direct synthesis of five-membered cyclic carbonates

The social responsibility of corporate mining has been challenged by a significant socio-political risk from local communities. These issues reduce shareholder value by increasing costs and decreasing the market perception of corporate social responsibility. Community engagement is the process of understanding the behavior and interests of a group of targeted mining communities through surveys and data analysis, with the purpose of incorporating mining community acceptance into the mining sustainability. While mining organizations have discussed community engagement to varying degrees, there are three main shortcomings in current studies, as concluded in the authors&rsquo, previous research. This paper presents a framework to apply discrete choice theory to improve mining community engagement and corporate mining social responsibility. In addition, this paper establishes the main technical challenges to implement the developed framework, and presents methods to overcome the challenges for future research with a case study. The contribution of this research will transform mine sustainability in a fundamental way by facilitating the incorporation of effective community engagement. This will lead to more sustainable mines that local communities support.

The sustainable development of the Yangtze River will affect the lives of the people who live along it as well as the development of cities beside it. This study investigated the relationship between shipping development and the water environment of the Yangtze River. Canonical correlation analysis is a multivariate statistical method used to study the correlation between two groups of variables, this study employed it to analyze data relevant to shipping and the water environment of the Yangtze River from 2006 to 2016. Furthermore, the Yangtze River Shipping Prosperity Index and Yangtze River mainline freight volume were used to characterize the development of Yangtze River shipping. The water environment of the Yangtze River is characterized by wastewater discharge, ammonia nitrogen concentration, biochemical oxygen demand, the potassium permanganate index, and petroleum pollution. The results showed that a significant correlation exists between Yangtze River shipping and the river&rsquo, s water environment. Furthermore, mainline freight volume has a significant impact on the quantity of wastewater discharged and petroleum pollution in the water environment.

Mineral products provide essential fuels and raw materials for industrialization and our daily life, but their influences on other aspects of life need to be taken into consideration. While the whole world benefits from mining’s contributions, most of the resulting detrimental impacts on the environment and society fall on the local communities. The participation of the local community is one solution to decrease the risks from community-related problems. Subsequently, the requirements of mining sustainable development can be met. A literature review was conducted on mining sustainability and stakeholder participation, and the shortcomings of existing research and difficulties of further study were discussed in detail. This study covers a broad understanding of mining sustainability from a mining community’s perspective. In addition, it offers a new mining sustainability scope based on the literature review. Besides the balance of economic, environmental, and social aspects, the mine owner and local community have to be engaged in the new mining sustainability scope. This literature review could improve community engagement and help mining companies to better understand local mining communities.

The ground articulating pipeline (GAP) system was developed to transport oil sand using a continuous transport system. This paper proposes a simulation-based optimisation approach to improve the efficiency of oil sand continuous transport systems at the operational level. Based on the analysis of shovel capacity, the authors recommend that this GAP transfer system should operate with a 70-ton capacity shovel. They also recommend that a surge hopper should be introduced on the mobile slurry system to maximise productivity of the GAP system. This simulation approach can be applied to crushers and conveyor belt systems.

Local community acceptance is a key indicator of the socio-political risk associated with a mining project. Discrete choice modeling could enhance stakeholder analysis, a critical step in community engagement. This paper seeks to identify and classify key mining project characteristics and demographic factors that influence individual acceptance of mining projects for discrete choice experiments. Six demographic factors were selected and project characteristics were classified into 16 characteristics, based on the literature. A survey of residents of mining and non-mining communities was used to test the hypothesis that these mine characteristics and demographic factors will influence respondents' decision to accept a proposed mining project. Four (age, gender, income and education) of the six demographic factors were confirmed to be significantly ( p

Correction for ‘Oxidative carboxylation of olefins with CO2: environmentally benign access to five-membered cyclic carbonates’ by Liang Wang et al., RSC Adv., 2020, 10, 9103–9115.

Discrete choice theory has been shown to be a viable way to study individual preferences for resource development. However, only a limited amount of literature assesses the effect of culture, socio-economic, historical, and regulatory factors on the classification of factors that are important to individual preferences for resource development used in designing valid discrete choice experiments. This work seeks to assess differences in the levels of importance among the determinants of public acceptance of mining projects due to differences in cultural, regulatory, socio-economic, and historical contexts. This will be accomplished by comparing the levels of importance as reported by respondents in the United States, China and Turkey. We used the same survey in the three countries to: (1) validate in China and Turkey the classification of mining project characteristics identified by previous research in the United States; (2) verify the key demographic factors that can be used to explain individual preferences relating to project characteristics in China and Turkey; and (3) compare the differences between attitudes of respondents from mining communities in the United States, China and Turkey. The median ranking of all 16 project characteristics was higher than the midpoint ranking (neither important nor unimportant), verifying that this classification of factors were valid in the three countries. Age, gender, income, education, and number of children were related to the respondents' rankings of the importance of the mining project characteristics. We observed several differences in the rankings that can be attributed to the differences in culture, socio-economics, and historical and regulatory context and found that the level of development and national culture played a moderating role in the effect of demographics on the respondents’ rankings. These results provide insights for those designing discrete choice experiments and other instruments for facilitating mining community engagement in cross-cultural settings.

Equations were developed to predict arsenate sorption on iron oxide coated sand, on the basis of the constant capacitance surface complexation model, assuming formation of bidentate surface complexes between arsenate and iron oxyhydroxide surface sites. The developed equations can predict arsenate adsorption when initial arsenate concentration, adsorbent concentration, and solution pH are known. The average discrepancy between experimental data and modeling results was less than 5%. The maximum arsenate sorption capacity is the only parameter required that needs to be estimated from experimental data. The developed equations were validated by modeling arsenate adsorption on iron oxide sand over the pH range 5–8, under various initial arsenate concentrations and iron oxide coated sand solid concentrations. The developed predictive equation can also be used for calculating arsenate adsorption performance on iron impregnated activated carbon. Finally, the developed equation can be used to calculate s...

Modeling the efficiency of arsenate removal at low initial arsenic (As) concentrations is a new challenge following the new maximum contaminant level (MCL) of As in drinking water, revised downward from 50 to 10 μg/L by the U.S. EPA. Many water systems across the United States are required to remove As from drinking water under the current regulations. However, most of the models used to predict As removal performance were developed and validated based on the old, higher concentration standard. This paper investigates and reports on the ability of a model, based on the diffuse double-layer (DDL) surface complexation model, to predict As removal for low As levels (10–20 μg/L). The model was validated with a pilot study using source water from Well No. 3 of the Mutual Domestic Water Consumers Association (MDWCA) in Anthony, New Mexico. Based on the comparison of experimental data with model results, the model presented here can successfully predict the efficiency of As removal by coprecipitation w...

The impact of methane explosions on mining operations can never be over-emphasized. The safety of miners could be threatened and local ventilation facilities are likely to be damaged by the flame and overpressure induced by a methane explosion event, making it essential to understand the destructiveness and influence range of a specific explosion. In this paper, the attenuation effect of geometric changes, most commonly bends, obstacles, and branches, present in the way of blast-wave propagation and the capability of the selected numerical model were studied. Although some relevant experimental research has been provided, quantitative analysis is insufficient. This paper investigates the attenuation factors of seven bends, three obstacles, and two T-branch scenarios to ascertain a better insight of this potentially devastating event quantitatively. The results suggest that (1) the numerical model used is capable of predicting four of the seven validated scenarios with a relative error less than 12%; (2) the maximum peak overpressure is obtained when the angle equals 50° for bend cases; and (3) the selected numerical scheme would overestimate the obstacle cases by around 15%.

Incidents of hazardous accumulations of CO2 in homes built on or near reclaimed mine land, in the last decade, have been shown to be linked to neutralization reactions between acidic mine drainage and carbonate material. Recent research has shown that CO2 fluxes on reclaimed mine land with this hazard are, sometimes, spatially autocorrelated (i.e., the spatial variability is not random). This result implies geostatistics can be used to delineate hazardous areas where fluxes are likely to exceed established thresholds. This study applies sequential Gaussian simulation to delineate this emerging hazard on a site in southwestern Indiana, USA. Due to lack of regulatory threshold limits for CO2 flux at the current time, the authors conduct a sensitivity analysis of the threshold limit using the 75th, 90th and 95th percentiles of the measured fluxes for the first day of monitoring. These limits are used to produce hazard maps, which are validated with the known hazard at the site. This work further shows the potential of surface CO2 flux monitoring as a cheap and effective strategy to monitor and delineate such hazards to avoid residential and commercial real estate development in high risk zones.

Sustainable mining has received much attention in recent years as a consequence of the negative impacts of mining and public awareness. The aim of this paper is to provide mining companies guidance on improving the sustainability of their sites through effective community engagement based on recent advances in the literature. It begins with a review of the literature on sustainable development and its relationship to stakeholder engagement. It then uses the literature to determine the dominant factors that affect community perceptions of mining projects. These factors are classified into five categories: environmental, economic, social, governance and demographic factors. Then, we propose a new two-stage method based on discrete choice theory and the classification that can improve stakeholder engagement and be cost-effective. Further work is required to validate the proposed method, although it shows potential to overcome some of the challenges plaguing current approaches.

The significance of local community acceptance to the success of a mine cannot be over-stated. Project sustainability has implications for local community acceptance as the development and operation of a mine can be viewed as a development intervention with concrete social, economic and environmental impacts. Although, some work has been done to understand these relationships, very little has been done to quantitatively model the relationship between project sustainability and community preferences. This paper presents a framework for quantitative community consultation for mining projects based on discrete choice theory. The paper establishes the most appropriate choice model and uses a review of the literature to select key determinants of mining community acceptance. Recommendations are made for future research to implement the proposed framework. This framework will allow engineers and regulators to better evaluate community input.