The exploitation of mineral resources and there's environmental impacts in Northern Hungary

Abstract

The paper gives a brief overview of the mineral resources, the volume of production and the size of the area affected by mining in North Hungary against the national background. The international and European conditions of mining, the reasons for the emergence of the present situation and the expected trends of development are likewise presented. In the past 15-20 years, there has been an important structural shift towards mineral raw materials used in the construction industry in Hungarian mining production. After the economic recession  caused by the change in political regime, there has been a boom in this field in the past 2-3 years.  These effects can also be felt in Northern Hungary, where both the number of mining areas and production are on the increase. This welcome development, however, is accompanied by an increase in environmental problems.

The second part of the paper focuses on the environmental performance of mining activities and the possible methods of measuring it. An important stage of environment protection is environment-based planning. As mining as such results in irreversible changes, these should be handled, controlled and directed in the stage of planning, which should then form the basis of environment protection activities, recultivation and country planning.

Mining as a production industry is distinguished from processing industries by four main features. Earlier, only the economic consequences of these features were analysed. Now, analysis is extended to environmental impacts, through which environmental consequences are investigated.

The possible methods of assessing the environmental impacts of mining,  handling major environmental impacts and ideal environment control are also covered in the paper.