Mining Impacts · impact
Waste rock and strip ratio
Land · During operation
- Category
- Land
- Timescale
- During operation
Mitigation
Backfilling worked-out pit sections, using waste as construction material where it is not acid-generating, and shaping and revegetating dumps as they are built rather than at the end.
Mechanism
Reaching ore in a pit means removing everything above and around it. The strip ratio — tonnes of waste per tonne of ore — is commonly several to one, so the waste dumps are the largest structures on most sites and outlast the pit itself.
Open on the Mining Impacts shelf — the interactive card, the filters, and everything alongside it.