Penn State Mineral Dust and GeoHealth Workshop

This project will bring together scientists from different fields to discuss how climate change and the push for clean energy might worsen dust-related health problems for miners and look for ways to fill the gaps in knowledge on how mining dust affects health.

There is an increasing need for an improved understanding of the climate change induced drivers on human health. Climate change is a global process, and it is expected that its impact may affect communities in different and unequal ways. Some effects of climate change are indirect and involve shifts in our geo-environmental evolution through the earth’s alterations that, in turn, can affect human health.

Decarbonization has been proposed to address the climate challenge and thus there will be increased mining activities for mineral resources to power the low-carbon transition. As more and different critical minerals are required for electrical generation and transportation (e.g. rare earth elements, lithium, nickel, cobalt), the virgin earth will be disturbed, potentially enhancing erosion and dust generation. The mining industry is a nationwide activity involving the recovery and processing of nonmetallic minerals, metal ores of all kinds, and solid fuels and energy sources such as coal and nuclear materials for energy transition.

Nearly the whole mineral extraction process is accompanied by respirable dust generation which is responsible for many human diseases, such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, stunted lung development, pneumoconiosis and lunch cancer, cardiac arrhythmias, acute myocardial infarction, etc. Recently, an increase in prevalence and severity of occupational respirable diseases has been observed in various hot-spot geographic areas. The recent report by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine states that the possibility that high rates of operator compliance with the 2014 new dust rule (1.5 mg/m3) requirement may not guarantee that dust exposure will be controlled adequately, or that future disease rates will decline because of the uncertainties about the cause of increase in disease prevalence and severity.

The reasons for the miners’ disease increase are not obvious but could be related to changes in mining practices and conditions (for example, increases in equipment size and horsepower and mining increasingly thinner coal seams) leading to the increase of extraction of rock containing crystalline silica and other respirable dust components. To clarify these uncertainties, we propose to conduct this project to provide a transdisciplinary platform for science-based discussion and idea exchange toward identifying the research gaps on mineral dust and geohealth relationship.