Improve sustainability of stone mining region in developing countries based on cleaner production evaluation: Methodology and a case study in Laizhou region of China

Abstract The mining activities significantly lower the sustainability in the stone mining region. Cleaner production (CP) is more likely to be proposed to achieve the sustainable development in the mining regions. Therefore, the stone mining industry has begun to implement many CP technologies and initiatives to tackle with ecological problems caused by the mining production. However, the CP practices do not solve the problems sufficiently, because of the low level of implementations by the stone mining companies, especially in the developing countries. This paper aims to establish a support framework for the stone mining industry to develop reasonable CP strategy and avoid inefficient CP practices. Our research provides a methodology for evaluating the CP level, including the principles of establishing indicator and standard system, the method of developing evaluation algorithm and the approach of data collection. A CP evaluation system is developed for the first time in the stone mining industry, which enables the methodology to be operationalization in the real evaluation process. The study also introduced the sensitivity analysis and confidence interval (ci) theory to ensure the reliability of the system and the validity of the evaluation results, respectively. A case study in Laizhou region of China illustrates how a CP strategy develops based on the CP evaluation results. The strategy has achieved collaborative optimization of various indexes of sustainability performance in the mining region.