Impact Assessment From Coal Mining Area in Southern Brazil

The mining activity is highly environmental impacting, being the excavation process and waste sterile rejects crowding the main pollution sources. The Santa Catarina Coal Basin has great importance, considering that contains 4.3 billions tons of coal (13% of the Brazilian reserve) and 6.400 hectares of degraded area. That way, the study objective was to characterize and identify the ambient impacts derivated from coal mining activities, at the Sideropolis city, SC. The base method used to evaluate was The Leopold matrix which adaptations were made according to a qualitative attribute weighting matrix to verify the significance of impacts. The interaction between two actions of the enterprise and 11 generated environmental impacts was analysed according to the attributes of frequency, extension, duration, direction and degree, both in the physical and anthropic environments. All impacts had a negative direction, where the most striking activity was the opening of the cava, which, when forming the acidic lagoon, changes the surface water quality, being described as of great importance. Therefore, recognizing the principal environment problems could help on strategies to accomplish the recovery requirements of degraded areas on this area.