Dispersion Modeling of Traffic Emissions originated from Mining: The Case of Artvin

Mining can be defined as the work of extracting any material that has an economic value such as ore, industrial raw material, coal and petroleum in the earth’s crust and providing necessary raw material. Today, interest in the mining sector has been increased in order to meet the developing technology and the increasing energy needs. However, since there is no serious environmental management system applied to mining activities, these activities have significant harmful effects. One of these effects is the air pollution caused by the vehicles during transportation of the extracted raw material. This study investigates the emissions of CO, NOx and PM10 due to traffic from the point where ore is extracted to the operation site in the copper mine which was established at Cerattepe location, Artvin city of Eastern Black Sea region. Within the scope of the study, the mentioned road route was divided into 5 regions and the emissions due to traffic before and after the establishing of the mine in each region were modeled by CAL3QHCR module in CALROADS 4.0 program and pollution distribution maps were created. Emission rates are calculated using CORINAIR's task-based emission factors. In order to evaluate the data obtained as a result of the modeling, the percentage increase in concentration was calculated and the results for each of the three pollutants were examined by a two-way ANOVA test. The results of the ANOVA test indicate that the traffic that will be formed after the mine has an adverse effect on the pollution effect with 95% reliability.