College of Mining, NUST MISIS, Moscow, Russia:

S. V. Chmykhalova, Associate Professor, Candidate of Engineering Sciences, tchmy@mail.ru

An essential adversity to the sustainable competitive capacity of a mining company is presented by the quality degradation of the useful component in ore being produced. As a result, the output of ore production is increased with proportionate rise in waste and cost of finished product. For this reason, the mining industry is offered with a challenge to find and justify solutions to the mentioned problems towards sutainable development. In terms of APATIT as the most dynamic mining company, the state of production has been evaluated over a long period of time, which has revealed revealed some new trends of further development. The predictive estimate procedure for the the content of useful component in ore being produced makes it possible to determine at certain relkiability the behavior and intensity of ore quality deterioration in time with regard to natural geological conditions. The procedure is based on the analysis of data on useful component content of produced ore from special literature. The scope of the analysis embraced data starting from 1960 and up to the present date. For Apaptit, the drop in the useful component content of produced ore in time is linear. Similarly, for the same period of time, the increase in waste (tailings), which was also linear, as well as dilution and operational losses were analyzed. The presented procedure is extenbale to other companies. In the meanwhile, methods for determination of useful component contet of ore being produced are being advanced. However, the methods need essential elaboration for application at a high-performance industry. The predictive estimate procedure for useful component content oof produced ore enables determination at certain reliability the nature and intensity of ore quality deteriation and makes it possible to assess the required sweeping changes aimed to reduce material resources spent for production and waste storage. This will promote implementation of sustainable development strategy targeted to preserve competitive ability of a mining company.

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