Environmental Impact Assessment of Quarrying Plants: An IRF Kriging Solution to Noise and Airborne Dust Monitoring

Abstract

A geostatistical approach is tested for the assessment of the environmental impact generated by industrial plants on the surrounding areas. To this end, a case study of a tuff quarry in the Italian region of Lazio is presented. The method utilised is Intrinsic Kriging with external drift which allows spatial maps of different hazardous agents like noise and airborne dust to be made through the integration of two different kinds of information. The initial data is taken from field measurements, which are carried out in accordance with the current regulations at various points in residential or built up areas near the site. Auxiliary data, integrated with the former as external drift, are obtained from specific propagation models respectively referred to sound propagation in outdoor environments by means of ISO 9613 norm and airborne dust propagation by means of ISC3 by US EPA approach. The use of a combination of these two information sources enabled both acoustic and airborne dust maps to be made which indicate not only the overall spatial trends of the acoustic and airborne climate of the area surrounding the site but also the local variations. Such results are generally difficult to achieve due to the limited data set and usually come at the price of increasing the number of measurements taken in the field. In order to quantify the contribution of introducing this integrated approach, scenarios are presented with and without external drift, using the same field samples as input in each. The results indicate a reduction in estimate variance for the cases analysed when using Intrinsic Kriging with external drift. Furthermore, it was observed from the analysis of cross validation and estimate variance that the use of external drift may also compensate for information loss, which may occur due to a reduction in the number of receptors in the monitor network for example, without affecting the quality of the final map. In the case study, on halving the number of measurements taken while introducing the suggested drift, the quality of the result remains similar.