Prioritizing Sustainable Development Criteria Affecting Open Pit Mine Design: A Mathematical Model

Abstract

With growing awareness of sustainable development and worldwide interest in corporate sustainability, the mining industry is under increasing pressure to design and plan not only based on geological, economical and technical factors, but also in accordance with sustainable development principles. Sustainable mining covers environmental, economic and social aspects of operations. In order to internalize sustainability in the mine design process, this paper attempts to quantify sustainable development criteria. Initially, 77 indicators of sustainable development affecting the open pit mine design were identified. By means of a preference voting system (PVS), the weight of each criterion was calculated. To reach this purpose, 4 importance levels: {Really Important, Quite Important, Less Important, Not Important} have been defined, where these importance levels represent the importance from the most to the least. It is clear that the votes in the last importance level (i.e. Not Important) should not influence the total score of each criterion. So, the weight of this importance level was considered equal to zero and then applied to a data envelopment model (DEA) based on 3 importance levels as ranking places to calculate the weights. Then the score and normalized weight of each criterion was calculated. Thus, thecompatibility of mine design and the sustainable development issue can be measured via the sum of satisfied criterion weights.