The leachability of pollutants from asbestos-containing waste, previously used for roofing was investigated. Laboratory tests were performed under static conditions (tests 1–20) in accordance with the TCLP methodology (with the use of acetic acid as the leaching medium, initial pH = 3.15). The maintaining of constant leaching conditions proved to be impossible at the experimental stage. Following the stabilization of conditions, the pH range for the obtained solutions increased to an average value of 8.3. Aluminum, boron, barium, cadmium, chromium, copper, iron, nickel, lead, strontium, zinc, and mercury were identified in the eluate. The low leachability of individual metals under the planned conditions was observed. In general, no leaching of such metals as cadmium, nickel, and lead was observed. The mercury content in the eluates is below the quantification limit, but the obtained values fall to around the limit of detection for the element. As compared with leaching with the use of distilled water (Klojzy-Karczmarczyk et al. 2021), zinc and boron additionally appear in eluates. The determined value of leachability for the individual analyzed elements increases from double to a few times with the use of the TCLP method. The value of leaching for barium is on average 5.56 mg/kg, for chromium it is 1.10 mg/kg, for copper 0.26 mg/kg, and for iron 0.80 mg/kg. In addition, the leaching of boron of around 3.00 mg/kg and of zinc 1.84 mg/kg was found. Higher leachability values were found only for strontium and aluminum. The leaching of strontium is on average around 62 mg/kg. While the leaching of aluminum is lower than values identified in the previous tests with the use of distilled water and is around 2.76 mg/kg. Products of leaching contain mainly pollutants characteristic of cement (aluminum, strontium, and iron).

Every social group exhibits a need to make decisions that are binding for all its members and the participation of various interest groups in decision-making today is an integral part of modern political and legal thought as well as administrative processes. Recently, increased community engagement and greater awareness of the society with regard to the possibility of influencing the development on a microregion (commune) scale have also been observed. This often translates into problems in obtaining a social license for a given project, which is particularly visible in mining activities. However, obtaining such a license requires the involvement and awareness of many stakeholder groups on which a project will have a direct impact. It should be ensured that this engagement takes place at a very early stage of a given project. In the case of mining activity, which is possible only after obtaining appropriate licenses (exploration or exploitation), this involvement takes the form of public consultation. This is due to the legal conditions presented in the following article for 3 EU countries (Poland, Austria, Sweden) and Serbia. The analysis showed that participation is mainly at the level of consultation in all countries and is an important element of the environmental impact assessment (EIA) procedure of the mining project, which is an important stage in obtaining a mining (less frequently exploration) license. Public consultations at the stage of spatial planning are also present and have a diverse scope. However, special attention should be paid to these as they are crucial for proper mineral deposit safeguarding. Stakeholders’ awareness of planning decisions taken by local authorities can be crucial for the fast path to obtaining both formal and informal concessions, which takes the form of social license to operate (SLO).

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development was adopted in 2015. The United Nations framework does not directly include raw materials in Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The mining industry has a great impact not only for the environment but also for its stakeholders, both from the nearest and the most remote surrounding. As such, the mining industry has the opportunity and potential to both positively and negatively impact on all seventeen SDGs. The introduction of the EU directive on the disclosure of non-financial data has a great impact on the reporting of sustainable development reporting. Additionally, in March 2020, the European Commission published the EU Taxonomy. With regard to the current geopolitical situation, some European Union members, such as Germany, France and the Netherlands, have taken the decision to open or re-open of their coal-fired plants. Admittedly, these countries underline that the inclusion of coal in their power industry is only temporary and limited to a well-defined period of time. The implementation of the SDGs should be partially important in the case of mining, the activities of which involve the extraction of various types of mineral resources, especially non-renewable resources. This raises two fundamental research questions; what is the actual level of the reporting of SDGs in the polish mining industry, and if the EU Taxonomy Regulations will increase the reporting of SDGs in Polish mining?

Nowadays, fighting to stop climate change is not only possibility, it is indisputably an imperative for our future life on the Earth. The concept of climate neutrality was established at the beginning of the twenty-first century but has gained importance in the last decade. Climate neutrality can be achieved if CO2 emissions are reduced to a minimum and all remaining CO2 emissions are offset with climate protection measures. In order to limit global warming to 1.5°C – a threshold the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) suggested is safe – climate neutrality is essential by 2050. The main aim of this article is to identify activities aimed at neutralizing the impact of mining and energy companies in Poland on climate and to assess the approach of commercial banks in Poland towards financing their activities towards climate neutrality. The article verifies the research hypothesis stating that commercial banks in Poland support the financing of activities conducive to achieving climate neutrality by companies from mining and energy industries. The empirical research was carried out in three stages. It included data analysis, case study and questionnaire survey. The study shows that the mining and energy industry in Poland is aware of the need to implement quick actions to reduce their negative impact on the environment and to achieve climate neutrality by 2050. Moreover, it has been proven that the banking sector in Poland is open to financing socially responsible investments (SRI) supporting activities for climate neutrality.

The earliest studies of the Moon consisted of observations from Earth and meteorites containing lunar material. As technology progressed, the observations were made using remote sensing techniques. The next stage of the Moon reconnaissance consisted of unmanned flights, and later manned flights, with the help of which, in-situ tests were performed. The obtained materials enable the formulation of conclusions both about the geological structure and the mineral resources of the moon. The latest maps provided by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and NASA Planetary Data System (PDS) enable a detailed analysis of the geological structure of the moon. Since they are available in shapefile format for QGIS and ArcGIS software, they can be freely modified and processed. On the basis of these, it is possible to analyze the complexity of the geological structure of the moon, especially with regard to the structure of its substrate and the surface covered with craters. Data obtained from the observation of the Moon with the use of research satellites and research carried out during landings related to the collection of samples enabled the formulation of conclusions about the raw materials present there. These raw materials are related to the surface layer of the so-called regolith, the recognition of which is relatively good because it is based not only on remote studies but also on the basis of collected samples. Additionally, there are indications of the possible presence of mineral resources related to the substrate, but its recognition is relatively poor because it is based on remote and geophysical surveys. The presented analysis shows that the Moon has such minerals as rare earth elements (REE) and Th and U found in the KREEP area. Fe and Ti are found to be in basaltic lava flows occurring in the mares and aluminum, silicon and Helium-3 occur in the regolith.

SEM Automated Mineralogy (SEM-AM) is an analytical system based on a scanning electron microscope (SEM) with backscattered electron detector and an energy dispersive X-ray spectrometer (EDS). This automated tool enables to quantify mineralogy, size and geometry of solid matter components. The paper presents a SEM-AM application in detection of mineralogical and textural sediment sorting on the example of a submarine gravity flow record from the Cergowa sandstones (Lower Oligocene) in the Polish Outer Carpathians. Analysis of high quality backscattered electron (BSE) imagery in combination with EDX spectra discriminates mineral phases in polished samples. These data are then processed by the mineral liberation analysis (MLA) software in order to extract size and shape information, and combine, compare and group components for further examination. Automated data extraction provides highly representative measurement statistics devoid of manual work bias. The Cergowa sandstones were prepared for the analysis as non-granular samples in coated thin sections and granular samples in epoxy mounts. The former samples provide mineralogical data whereas the latter additionally generate textural parameters, both essential in interpretation of variability of flow competence. Comparisons between samples from an individual bed and between different beds of the measured sections give insights into the spatial and temporal flow development at a given locality. On the other hand, a comparison of different sections and regions of the formation will provide basis for the reconstruction of submarine flow events throughout the sedimentary basin and contribute to the characterisation of the provenance areas. Highly detailed quantitative data generated by this procedure have great potential in helping to recognise complex relationships between mineralogical and textural sorting by depositional processes.

The rapid and accurate detection and identification of coal gangue is one of the premises and key technologies of the intelligent separation of coal gangue, which is of considerable importance for the separation of coal gangue. Focusing on the problems in the current deep learning algorithms for the detection and recognition of coal gangue, such as large model memory and slow detection speed, a rapid detection method for lightweight coal gangue is proposed. YOLOv3 is taken as the basic structure and improved. The MobileNetv2 lightweight feature extraction network is selected to replace Darknet53 as the main network of the detection algorithm to improve the detection speed. Spatial pyramid pooling (SPP) is added after the backbone network to convert different feature maps into fixed feature maps in order to improve the positioning accuracy and detection capability of the algorithm, thereby obtaining the lightweight network MS-YOLOV3. The experimental equipment was set up and multi-condition coal and gangue datasets were constructed. The model was trained and the identification and positioning results of the model were tested under different sizes, illumination intensities and various working conditions, and compared with other algorithms. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can detect the coal gangue quickly and accurately, with an mAP of 99.08%, a speed of 139 fps and a memory occupation of only 9.2 M. In addition, the algorithm can effectively detect mutually stacking coal and gangue of different quantities and sizes under different lights with high confidence and with a certain degree of environmental robustness and practicability. Compared with the YOLOv3, the performance of the proposed algorithm is significantly improved. Under the premise that the accuracy is unchanged, the FPS increases by 127.9% and the memory decreases by 96.2%. Therefore, the MS-YOLOv3 algorithm has the advantages of small memory, high accuracy and fast speed, which can provide online technical support for the detection and identification of coal and gangue.

The mining industry, including hard-coal mining, has a significant and multifaceted impact on all components of the environment. One of the factors is the production of various types of waste which, due to their physico-chemical and ecotoxic properties, do not always pose a threat to the environment and can be used in various ways. Such treatment of waste perfectly fits into the concept of the circular economy through the protection of natural resources and the maximum re-use of waste. One of the wastes generated by hard-coal mines is coal sludge from the purification of underground water in surface settling tanks. The article presents the results of research on the physico-chemical and phytotoxic properties of carbon sludges from two settling tanks with regard to assessing the possibility of their re-use in the reclamation of degraded areas. These sludges contain mainly sand fractions. An analysis of their chemical composition revealed the presence of heavy metals. Leachability studies have shown that despite the high concentrations of metals, a small quantity of these metals passes into the solution. In this respect, therefore, they do not pose a threat to the environment. However, a threat may result from the presence of chlorides and sulphates, the amounts of which are influenced by, among other factors, the time of waste storage in the settling tank. Phytotoxicity tests performed on garden cress ( Lepidium sativum) did not show a toxic effect at any concentration of the water extract. In addition, for one of the sludges, water extracts with concentrations starting from 12.5 and 50% stimulated the growth of the plant’s shoots and roots, respectively. The results show that the tested coal sludges may be used in appropriate doses for reclamation work, for example, when establishing a plant cover.

This article presents research on the structure of energy mixes and the dependence on imports of the EU-27 member states, with a particular emphasis on Poland. During the conducted research, a spatial information system was used. GIS tools made it possible to build layers presenting information based on the countries’ energy mix, the level of dependence on the import of this fuel, and the share of the Russian Federation in fuel imports. It was also examined whether the level of dependence on imports from Russia was dependent on the geographical location. Since it has been shown that the share of Russian fuel is significant in the energy mixes of many member states, and that security does not depend solely on import dependence, an energy security assessment measure has been created (SES). As the level of security consists of many factors, assessing each of them separately is very difficult and unclear. Therefore, in order to simplify this analysis, it was necessary to determine one indicator that would take into account all the factors influencing the level of energy security. Poland is privileged in terms of access to fossil fuels due to its rich coal deposits; however, the potential of this fuel is not used, which is also indicated by the level of the SES measure. In the case of Poland, SES amounts to less than 16% and is almost three times lower than the EU-27 average. The indicator made it possible to indicate not only those factors that positively affect the level of energy security but also those that adversely affect it. It also enabled the identification of possible remedial measures.