4 Environmental Impacts Of Coal Industry

It's lunch time. You drive your car and go to grocery store for preparing something delicious. You pick chicken and a pre-made salad. Have you noticed that such actions affect environment? How could it be possible? Let me explain. When you go by car, it releases carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Air gets polluted. The store that you went into, require light which is powered by coal and as you know that coal mining destroy our ecosystem. What about that salad? Its ingredients grown on farm using harmful pesticides and then washed into local streams poisoning the fish and aquatic plants. Water gets polluted. Even chicken transported by trucks that emits poisonous gas. A smallest action of human creates an environmental change. Think of a bigger picture. Humans are completely dependent on mother nature for survival. But, what you give back? Harmful chemicals that pollutes water, carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide such undesirable gases causing air pollution. We really need to think on this and stop some where.

Have you ever wonder which is one of the main reason in determining the nature? Industrial pollution is the main cause. Earlier industries were limited and so they were less harmful to en vironment. But, with growing population several industries evolved on a large scale with massive production. This has depleted certain natural resources damaging the environment permanently. Best example is deforestation which is clearing of forest for sake of production. “ Grow More Trees” is our motto. Do you think we took this seriously? Just to increase production level, what are we doing? Cutting down the trees and cripple the system. Greed can lead to catastrophic accidents and eventually society has to suffer. Mainly primary industries has caused a massive damage to earth especially mining of coal. This has become one of the biggest issue today.

Coal, one of the fossil fuel, is mined with an aim of producing electricity. Imagine a day without electricity. I remember a day when the light goes off just for an hour and I was like yelling and calling at electricity office. We really could not live without it. Not even an hour. Now, you might have come to know how coal is important and so its mining as well. But Wait! All good things come with something not acceptable. Have you ever think of how much damage is caused to surface of earth while mining coal? Let me list down all the drastic consequences that comes along with mining of it.

1. Emission of harmful gases deteriorates ambient air quality

With an aim to extract coal from underground mines, mining operation is done. Such operation includes drilling, hauling, collection and transportation and this results into emission of harmful gases like methane, sulfur-dioxide, oxides of nitrogen and carbon monoxide . Just like other fossil fuels, combustion of coal produces CO2 affecting the green house effect. This even increase in global warming. This even has major impact like global warming. Don't you think such release of gases will pollute the air? Off-course Yes. Much more air quality deterioration is caused due to opencast mining in which mining operation is carried without any tunnel or shafts. Imagine how much destructive it will be? Such emission leads to serious health hazards with a rapid increase of respiratory disease such as chronic bronchitis and asthma. Really, we need to think on this otherwise the day is no far where we are left alone by nature. Within last few year production of coal is sky-rocketing. You can figure it out how the production of coal has been incresed in china in last few years.

2. Adverse impact to hydrological regime

Process of mining, burning the coal and waste storage of coal pollutes the water. How? A flowing water comes into contact of coal mining activities that has exposed rocks. Such rocks contains pyrite, a sulphur bearing mineral. This mineral reacts with water forming sulphuric acid. Such runoff results into a metal rich water that is Acid mine drainage (AMD). How dreadful it would be to those aquatic plants and animals? And what about us? We too are affected as we drink that contaminated water. Other reasons that pollutes the water are erosion of mine benches , overloaded and reject dumps, failing dams and even during discharging of million litres of water itself. “Water is life” But, we have made it such that becomes dangerous to your life. How mean we are?

3. Enormous Land Disturbance Caused due to mining operation

Mining operation goes through large scale excavation, creation of negligent land, removal of top soil, dumping of solid waste and cutting of roads. Usually, mine collapse in underground mining and land above it start to sink result into an interruption. News about such catastrophe is frequently heard. But, opencast mining is more destructive than underground mining. It scraps away earth and rock to get coal buried near the surface. It destroy landscapes, forest, wildlife, contaminates ground water and result into air and noise pollution. Such environmental affects are so profound that recovery of it is next to impossible. So, why we become so careless and constantly dig though it affects our environment.

4. Mining causes noise and vibration

Do you like someone screaming? No Why? Because it is too unpleasant to our ears. Think of a blast or something weird sound at a high volume. How terrible it might be for our ears. Think of people living around the areas where mining activities takes place. Why? Because such mining operation produces lot of noise and vibration as well. Hundreds of tones of explosives blast in the mining area and this creates a massive noise pollution. Hearing loss of human ears is one of the major consequence of noise. Imagine how dreadful it might be? Beast in forest are more sensitive to such noise and so they are more affected than humans.

Want to improve environmental sustainability in industries? There has been established many institutional bodies that offers diploma in Environmental Management. Many of them even offer excellent trainig and one of my friend has experienced best training of workplace environmental at Brisbane in Australia.

Being a part of this wonderful nature, each and every individual is responsible for such destruction. Why we have become so greedy that we don't care of its frighting consequences. There is still time to save our nature otherwise it will be too late to sum up everything.