Air Quality Impact Assessment and Management of Mining Activities Around an International Heritage Site in India

A comprehensive field study has been carried out to measure the background air quality status and identify the air pollution sources from opencast mines around a heritage site in India. Air quality modeling has been carried out to envisage dust concentration due to the existing and closed mines in the region. The predicted total PM10 and PM2.5 levels at the selected receptor locations ranged from 86.39 to 194.89 and from 34.82 to 99.55 μg m−3, respectively. The air quality modeling exercise predicted that levels of PM10 and PM2.5 might increase from 3.2 to 23.1 and from 2.1 to 8.9 μg m−3 respectively due to mining activities when some of the closed mines will be operated in the region without the controlled emission. Hence, adequate measures have been suggested to control air pollution from mining activities. An intelligent dry fog system has been designed to suppress dust emission efficiently from mineral processing plants and opencast mines. The developed system has special features for facilitating eco-friendly mining