Geoenvironment Management and Sustainability - Sustainable Practices in Geoenvironmental Engineering - page 16

of resource exploration and exploitation and (b) human activities such as construction
of facilities, disposal and land management of waste, as well as agricultural land use,
underground water use, and abnormal climate, as shown in Table 1.1. How the various
industries (life-supporting and manufacturing-production) and their associated activities
interact with the geoenvironment can be viewed as follows:
1. Resource extraction and processing : The various industries included in this
group use the geoenvironment as a resource pool containing materials and
substances that can be extracted and processed as value-added products. The
common characteristic of the industries in this group is processing of material
extracted from the ground . Included in this group are (a) the metalliferrous min-
ing industries, (b) those industries involved in extraction and processing of
other resources from the ground such as nonmetallic minerals (potash, refrac-
tory, and clay minerals, phosphates), (c) the industries devoted to extraction
of aggregates, sand, and rock for production of building materials, and (d) the
raw energy industries such as those involved in the extraction of hydrocarbon-
associated materials and other fossil fuels (natural gas, oil, tar sands, and coal).
Included in this list is the extraction and recovery of uranium for the nuclear
power industry.
2. Utilization of land and soil as a resource material in aid of production : Essentially, this
group includes the agro and forest industries and also the previously mentioned
nonmetallic minerals industries.
3. Water, groundwater, and aquifer harvesting : We include the hydroelectric facilities
and industries associated with extraction and utilization of groundwater and
aquifers.
4. Use of land as a facility : This category considers land as a facility for use, for exam-
ple, in the land disposal of waste products. Broadly speaking, we can consider
the land surface environment here as a resource for treatment and containment
of waste products generated by all the industries populating the previous three
categories.
Some of the major negative or degradative geoenvironmental impacts resulting from
the various activities associated with production technology, e.g., agriculture, forestry,
mining, energy, and general production, are shown in Figure 1.5. The nature of the
threats to the land environment and the waste streams are shown in Figure 1.6. These
affect both soil and water quality. We will discuss the nature of some of the impacts in
detail in the next few chapters. The diagrams show the nature of the threats originat-
ing from the source-activities and their immediate physical impact in the land environ-
ment. The bottom-most element in Figure 1.6 shows some of the required sets of action
for reduction of threats such as pollution management and toxicity and concentration
reduction. Note that problems such as habitat protection and impacts and air quality are
not considered since the attention in this topic is focused on the physical land environ-
ment itself. In that sense, for the problems and activities shown in Figure 1.5, pollution
management and control will have to be exercised to minimize damage to the geoenvi-
ronment, which in most cases refer to the surface environment and the receiving surface
water and groundwater. Since many of the sources of the impacts cannot be completely
reduced to zero, impact management will have to be practiced. Many of the discussions
in succeeding chapters of this topic relate to the effects of anthropogenic stressors on the