Valorization of undeveloped industrial rock deposits in Poland

• Simple mode of industrial rocks deposits valorization was proposed.
• Rock quantity and quality, mining, environmental and land use criteria were used.
• Ranking allows to distinguish valuable deposits for their special safeguarding.
• The number of high value deposits in Poland is limited.

Mineral deposit attributes are: renewability specific location controlled by geology, and the important role of meeting the needs of society. Their resources should be therefore rationally used. It requires in particular safeguarding access to deposits areas. The way to indicate the valuable deposits to protect them seems to be their valuation, using uniform criteria. The authors present a simple method of mineral deposits value ranking. It consists of deposits ranking value in four, separate domains: quality and size (resources) of deposit, as a main domain, mining conditions, environmental conditions, and land-use planning restrictions. Size of deposit and mineral (rock) quality parameters were defined for each kind of mineral commodity. Mining conditions were described by the degree of exploitation difficulties and the possibility to deliver the raw material to customers. Both environmental and land-use planning domains indicate some limits related to nature protection, housing and industrial building. Within each of four domains of evaluation 3 categories were distinguished, allowing for the specification of each deposit through a four letter symbol. The presented method was applied on yet undeveloped industrial mineral and rock deposits in Poland. These results are presented and discussed in the article.