A GIS Software Module for Environmental Impact Assessment of the Open Pit Mining Projects for Small Mining Operators in Kazakhstan

Considering product life cycle characteristics and industry background in environmental impact analysis and application: a case study of a television

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is widely used to evaluate product's life cycle environmental impact and identify the environmental weaknesses. However, it is difficult for existing LCA software to perform flexible LCA analysis based on the product life cycle characteristics and industry background. Meanwhile, under the existing LCA research model, product designers and manufacturers are usually not LCA evaluators, resulting in a certain time gap between the evaluation results and product improvement. Designers with less experience in green design often find it difficult to identify high environmental impact links in products at different life cycle stages and product levels, and updated products are challenging to meet various environmental restrictions. This paper establishes a multi-module product life cycle analysis model that combines product industry background that includes basic information, assessment information, structural information, and restriction information to achieve the multi-scenario of product LCA in different dimensions in a typical domain. The calculated mechanism of the dynamic power emission factor is built according to the service time and space dimensions. The proposed method forms an integrated environmental performance evaluation of household appliance (EPEHA) system. A software assessment and an optimization method are proposed to improve the EPEHA system. The results of this study show that these proposed methods can improve the timeliness and diversity of results analysis of product LCA in the field of household appliances in China. The universal data exchange format and simple operation interface of the EPEHA system enable people related to the product to quickly understand the environmental impact of the product in different scenarios, even if they lack green design knowledge and professional software training.

Mining Exploration with UAV, Low-Cost Thermal Cameras and GIS Tools—Application to the Specific Case of the Complex Sulfides Hosted in Carbonates of Udías (Cantabria, Spain)

The depletion of natural resources implies the need for a constant search for new reserves to satisfy demand. In the mining sector, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have revolutionised geo-information capture and modelling to allow the use of low-cost sensors for prospecting and exploration for potentially exploitable resources. A very powerful alternative for managing the huge volume of data is the Geographic Information System (GIS), which allows storage, visualisation, analysis, processing and map creation. The research in this paper validates a new quasi-automatic identification of mining resources using GIS thermal-image analysis obtained from UAVs and low-cost sensors. It was tested in a case that differentiated limestone from dolostone with varying iron content, and different thermal behaviour from solar radiation, thereby ensuring that the thermal image recorded these differences. The objective is to discriminate differences in an image in a quasi-automatic way using GIS tools and ultimately to determine outcrops that could contain mineralisation. The comparison between the proposed method with traditional precision alternatives offered differences of only 4.57%, a very small deviation at this early stage of exploration. Hence, it can be considered very suitable.

Geological Resource Planning and Environmental Impact Assessments Based on GIS

The purpose is to study the geological resource planning and environmental impact assessments based on the geographic information system (GIS). In this study, the land resources of Yinan County in southeastern Shandong Province are taken as the research object. Based on a GIS, the current situation of land resource development is analyzed, land resource planning is carried out, and environmental impact mitigation measures are evaluated and analyzed through the environmental impact. The results obtained depict the distribution of cultivated land; the development area is 1617.31 hm2, of which 577.32 hm2 is cultivated land, 30.43 hm2 is garden land, 399.66 hm2 is forest land, 40.87 hm2 is urban and rural construction land, 10.11 hm2 is traffic water conservancy and other construction land, and 558.92 hm2 is natural reserve land. In the layout of the construction land, the development area is 841.94 hm2, of which 175.44 hm2 is cultivated land, 47.88 hm2 is garden land, 100.54 hm2 is forest land, 0.1 hm2 is other agricultural land, 90.45 hm2 is urban and rural construction land, 3.66 hm2 is traffic water conservancy and other construction land, 11.33 hm2 is water area, and 412.54 hm2 is natural reserve land. The impact of the implementation of planning on most indicators is positive and beneficial, while the impact of negative indicators is relatively small. It is revealed that the implementation of the plan has little impact on most of the ecological environment indicators. Construction and cultivated land development further improve the level of urbanization. In the process of planning implementation, corresponding measures should be taken to slow down or eliminate the negative development of the ecological environment.