Environmental impact of recycling coal mining wastes in Huaibei City, China

Mining waste management has been a hot issue because the related environmental problems and other hazards. Coal is an important energy and raw material widely used. A huge quantities of waste materials are generated by coal mining every year which causes natural calamity and environmental problems. In many ways coal mining waste can be recycled to minimize the ammount of the waste, to prevent the pollution, to mitigate the hazards caused by them. In this paper we take minestone recycling as an example to estimate the environmental behavior and the benefit of reusing. The embodied energy and carbon emissions in the production process of bricks produced by recycling minestone are discussed. The benefits of minimizing the quantity of the coal mining wastes, mitigating the land occupation by stockpiles of minestone are also discussed. The results show that recycling minestone to produce building bricks can reduce energy consumption in production process compared with conventional clay bricks while the carbon emissions of the minestone bricks is higher than onventional clay bricks. The results should be helpful in coal mining waste management and provide data support in recycling alternative of coal mining wastes.