New Section "Management, Economics and Finance in Mineral Engineering: Quality, Costs and Sustainability"

Management, Economics and Finance in Mineral Engineering: Quality, Costs and Sustainability

Section Editor: Dariusz Sala, AGH University of Krakow.

Aims and scope

This Section extends the thematic scope of Inżynieria Mineralna — Journal of the Polish Mineral Engineering Society by adding a managerial, economic and financial perspective. Our centre of gravity remains the same as that of the parent journal — mining and mineral processing — but the new Section makes space for work in which mineral engineering is deliberately brought together with the tools of management and economic analysis. We are interested in what happens at the point where managerial decisions meet the technological process: how they shape product quality, how they translate into costs, and how they respond to the demands of sustainability.

The ambition of the Section is to offer authors and readers of Inżynieria Mineralna a space where the technical and the economic dimensions are not run in parallel but examined as a single decision-making fabric. On one side, we publish work devoted to operations management and performance measurement (KPI, OEE), quality improvement — including the quality of process data — reliability and maintenance, risk management, and business models. On the other, we pursue a distinctly economic line: the evaluation of profitability and efficiency of technological and environmental investments.

We place particular value on studies in which financial analysis covers the full life cycle of an installation — from design and commissioning, through optimisation and modernisation, to decommissioning. In practice, this means combining life cycle costing (LCC) with classical investment metrics such as NPV and IRR, working in CAPEX and OPEX terms, and complementing these with sensitivity analysis and scenario-based reasoning. In a strong paper, the technological data typical of Inżynieria Mineralna — processing parameters, consumption, yield, machine availability — do not sit alongside the economic model but are woven into it in a way that genuinely supports investment and operational decisions.

We equally welcome work that brings in the environmental perspective. Of greatest interest is life cycle assessment (LCA) together with life cycle inventory (LCI), conducted in a "cradle-to-grave" or "cradle-to-gate" framing — for individual technologies and processes as well as for whole raw-material supply chains, including comparative analyses across technological variants.

With regard to impact categories, we value rigorous reporting of greenhouse gas emissions in CO₂ equivalent, energy consumption broken down by renewable and non-renewable sources, and the water footprint. A separate and important area is the management of waste and processing residues — including the recovery of rare earth elements and other critical raw materials. We also welcome work addressing toxicological indicators and acidification and eutrophication potentials.

The Section publishes research articles, industrial case studies, methodological reviews, and implementation reports.

Keywords: operations management, cost controlling, process cost accounting, KPI, OEE, quality management, data quality, reliability, maintenance, risk, CAPEX, OPEX, NPV, IRR, LCC, sensitivity analysis, scenarios, business models, sustainability, ESG, decarbonisation, energy efficiency, LCA, LCI, carbon footprint (CO₂e), water footprint, waste and processing residues.