Assessment of Mining Activities Impacts on Sustainable Development Using Decision Making Methods

Mining activities are along with social, environmental, and economic impacts on the surrounding site. Some of these impacts are positive and a number of others are negative. Sustainable development is a concept that was introduced at the end of twentieth century and it covers environmental, economic, and social aspects of mining operations. Each of these aspects is known as the pillars of the sustainable development. In this paper, a combination of assessment matrix and decision-making methods is used to assess mining impacts on sustainable development. The method is applied in Golgohar and Sangan iron ore mines of Iran. This method was conducted by forming an assessment matrix. In this matrix, one dimension contains 11 criteria for the pillars of sustainable development, while the other one contains the impacting factors. The impacting factors for each mine were determined by the aid of TOPSIS method. The result of this study highlighted that Sangan and Golgohar mine's scores are 65.98 and 32.28, respectively. It means that the negative impacts in Sangan mine are much higher than Golgohar mine.