A new sustainable closed-loop supply chain model for mining industry considering fixed-charged transportation: A case study in a travertine quarry

Abstract

Mining industries in general and stone mining in particular play a vital-infrastructural role in any economy due to its vast impacts on other sectors such as construction, production, and even banking. The main purpose of this research is to investigate sustainability aspects of mining industry of decorative stone quarries in Iran in general and a specific case study in particular through a mathematical optimization approach. In this paper, a novel closed-loop approach is proposed for the first time (to the best of our knowledge) to be utilized in a real-case travertine quarry. Indeed, a stone quarry is considered and a closed-loop network is provided to determine appropriate strategies for stone wastes and end of life stones of the buildings. The quarry extracts the stone blocks from the mountain and then cut them into the appropriate pieces by wire sawing machines. Besides, at the decorative stone quarry, based on the insight observations, the outputs are in 4 grades based on their quality depend on the fractures and cleavages of the cut stones.In the presented network, by focusing on decorative stones, recycling centers are the main player of collecting, processing, and selling the wastes and end of life stones. In order to regard sustainable approach, minimizing energy consumption is considered as well as profit maximization in the objective functions of the model and service level requirements. In addition, due to the real requirements, fixed-charged is considered in transportations. Then, in order to achieve the Pareto front and the non-dominated solutions, a repetitive ε-constraint approach is developed here. The principal results prove that the sustainable closed-loop approach is able to be implemented successfully in mining industry. The major conclusion of this study specially about the case study show that closed-loop supply chain of decorative stone quarries can be both profitable and feasible.