Small step, great rewards: rethinking mining sustainability from old perspectives to new frames

There are increasing number of abandoned mines, which has gradually become a striking challenge for sustainable development and resource recycling. Safety risks and environmental pressures have obliged the mining industry to achieve the secondary development of mines. This paper builds a conceptual framework for abandoned mine resource utilization, and then denotes the 5 R principles (remining, recovery, redevelopment, reutilization, and recycling) and the energy-based, resource-based and function-based development patterns for scientific resource deployment with abandoned mines. Decision factors are investigated from four types of reutilization modes with 43 indicators, which can be classified as economy, resource potential, geography and safety. An integrated analytic hierarchy process (ANP) and strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats (SWOT) model are employed to explore the suitable reutilization methods for abandoned mines. The results from the case study show that suitable temperature conditions and technical problems are the top two decisive factors with weights of 0.3178 and 0.1604 respectively. The best strategy for a stone pit is to develop the service industry, which is valued at 20.99% in the seven strategies. The findings of this research indicate the urgent task of abandoned mine database construction and the significance of social performance management for mine closure. Implications are advanced for sustainable management and abandoned mine resource conservation, which help to implement low-carbon transition in the mining sector from the life cycle and cradle-to-cradle perspectives while achieving socioeconomic development and the transformation of resource-based cities.