Coal is the widespread fossil fuel on earth. It provides the necessary material foundation for economic development of a country. However, coal mining activities cause a lot of environmental impacts that are hazardous to the health of citizens in mining regions and place costs on the government. According to government laws and regulations, coal mines should invest in related pollution treatment projects to meet the emission standards. How to allocate the limited resources among a set of pollutant treatment projects to minimize the total losses, including penal loss and vacancy loss, from an investment perspective is a typical decision-making problem. Therefore, the present study proposed a discrete dynamic programming procedure to provide an effective solution for decision-making in treatment project investment. Furthermore, a case study involving the Laojuntang coal mine of Zhengzhou Coal Industry (Group) of China on the treatment project investment problem was implemented using the proposed model. The results demonstrate that the proposed model is effective and applicable for environmental investment decision-making at a typical coal mine in terms of minimizing the total losses. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.