Due to the constantly deteriorating environmental situation in the regions with mining enterprises, the article considers the topical issue of disposing the maximum possible volume of waste from the mining and processing of low-grade ferrous ores through the creation of an effective underground environmental geotechnology. Traditional procedure with descending mining of reserves with a caving system does not allow waste to be disposed of in a gob. The idea is to use geotechnology based on the ascending order of mining the ore body, room excavation, leaving truncated pillars, and staggered arrangement of adjacent rooms in height, which makes it possible to form containers for waste disposal in the form of a cementless backfill. The main characteristics of the proposed procedure are investigated and compared with the traditional procedure of low-grade iron ores mining. It was established that from the point of view of the complete extraction of reserves and the unit costs for the preparatory-development operations, the processes are comparable, while in terms of the mining quality, the proposed option is much more efficient. Evaluation of environmental geotechnology by the criterion of waste disposal, performed according to the proposed methodology, showed that the combination of these technical solutions ensures the placement in the formed gob from 80 to 140% of all waste generated during the mining and beneficiation of low-grade iron ores.
The ores of non-ferrous and precious metals, represented by hard rocks, has a peculiar feature, that is the effect of segregation, that is the tendency of ore minerals to break down into small size classes, which in the underground mining method accumulate in significant quantities on uneven surface of bottom layers and subsequently are lost. When mining valuable non-metallic materials, there is an acute problem of overgrinding, when fines do not meet the requirements for the quality of the final product. It is well known that the granulometric composition of the ore depends mainly on the technology and parameters of drilling and blasting operations. In underground mining of ore deposits, the main method of drilling and blasting is the borehole blasting with continuous construction charges with the ring pattern. The main drawbacks of the method are: uneven distribution of the explosive along the plane of the broken layer and the expenditure of a significant part of the blast energy of the charges of the continuous structure on the blasting effect, necessarily associated with over-grinding the ore. To solve these problems, the authors proposed a blasting technology, the essence of which lies in the fact that the uniform distribution of the energy concentration of explosives in the broken layer is ensured by the dispersion of charges by air gaps and a certain order of their placement in the ring plane. For the practical implementation of the technology, a method has been developed to form dispersed charges in deep boreholes that do not require a significant increase in labor costs and additional special means. A special technique has been created that allows defining the dispersion parameters, ensuring the sustained specific consumption of explosives over the entire plane of the broken layer. Experimental studies of the proposed technology in the natural conditions of an underground mine for the extraction of valuable granulated quartz were carried out. As a result, the possibility of a significant reduction in the specific consumption of explosives (by 42 %) has been established. At the same time, the yield of the commercial product increased by 10.7 % in total, and the yield of the fraction most favorable for further processing increased by 33.7 %.
