The social responsibility of corporate mining has been challenged by a significant socio-political risk from local communities. These issues reduce shareholder value by increasing costs and decreasing the market perception of corporate social responsibility. Community engagement is the process of understanding the behavior and interests of a group of targeted mining communities through surveys and data analysis, with the purpose of incorporating mining community acceptance into the mining sustainability. While mining organizations have discussed community engagement to varying degrees, there are three main shortcomings in current studies, as concluded in the authors’ previous research. This paper presents a framework to apply discrete choice theory to improve mining community engagement and corporate mining social responsibility. In addition, this paper establishes the main technical challenges to implement the developed framework, and presents methods to overcome the challenges for future research with a case study. The contribution of this research will transform mine sustainability in a fundamental way by facilitating the incorporation of effective community engagement. This will lead to more sustainable mines that local communities support.

In this study, we investigated the oxidative mechanisms of nano zero-valent iron (nZVI) enhanced potassium ferrate (K₂FeO₄), focusing on tributyltin (TBT) and triphenyltin (TPhT) as target pollutants. The addition of nZVI enhanced the degradation of both organic tin compounds by K₂FeO₄, exhibiting pseudo-first-order kinetics influenced by pH, carbonate, and fulvic acid. nZVI, as a reducing agent, facilitated the generation of stronger oxidizing species Fe (V) and Fe (IV) from K₂FeO₄ through electron transfer. The presence of hydroxyl radicals (OH) was confirmed by tert-butyl alcohol (TBA) verification. Intermediate products of TBT degradation by nZVI-enhanced K₂FeO₄ were identified using GC-MS, confirming de-alkylation leading to stepwise oxidation to inorganic tin ions. Due to excessively long Sn-C bonds in diphenyltin, rendering them unstable, Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations were employed. Results indicated that Fe (IV) and Fe (V) predominantly attacked the Sn-C bonds of TPhT, while OH primarily targeted the benzene ring. HOMO energy levels suggested that Fe (V) was more prone to oxidizing TPhT than Fe (IV). Gibbs free energy calculations demonstrated that, in the presence of Fe (IV) and Fe (V), the energy barrier for breaking bonds and oxidizing into inorganic tin ions decreased, favoring the process over the self-decomposition of TPhT. Additionally, the lower energy barrier for OH indicated an easier degradation of TPhT. This study reveals that nZVI-enhanced K₂FeO₄ effectively removes TBT and TPhT, contributing to the understanding of the ferrate-mediated degradation mechanism of organic tin compounds. The findings offer insights and theoretical guidance for remediating organic tin pollution in aquatic environments.