Over the past half century, a surprising number of major pollution incidents occurred due to tailings dam failures. Most previous studies of such incidents comprised forensic analyses of environmental impacts after a tailings dam failure, with few considering the combined pollution risk before incidents occur at a watershed-scale. We therefore propose Watershed-scale Tailings-pond Pollution Ris...

Application of municipal biosolids to mine tailings can enhance revegetation success, but may cause adverse environmental impacts, such as increased leaching of NO3- and metals to ground water. Kinetic weathering cells were used to simulate geochemical weathering to determine the effects of biosolid amendment on (i) pH of leachate and tailings, (ii) leaching of NO3- and SO4(2-), (iii) leaching ...

BACKGROUND Chrysotile from the mine in Balangero, Italy is considered to be free of tremolite. In a cohort study of miners and millers only two pleural cancers were reported, a finding considered to indicate that chrysotile has a low potency for inducing mesothelioma. However, follow-up ended in 1987 and white-collar workers and the employees of subcontractors were not studied. METHODS To com...

At the Bonfim mine, cyanide processing used to extract gold from abandoned tailings represents an important environmental concern. In order to evaluate cyanide concentrations, twenty samples of sediments of the main streams crossing the mine site, and ten samples of the five mainly tailings were analyzed for total cyanide. Cyanide was found in two samples of tailings (0.83 and 1.44mg/Kg of tota...

South Africa is a mineral-rich country with metals such as gold, copper, and platinum group metals being exploited to a significant extent in the country’s mining history. Mining generates large volumes of tailings, with consequent disposal and environmental problems. By far the most gold that has been mined in South Africa (98%) has come from the Witwatersrand goldfields (Messner, 1991). The g...

Citation: Mevenkamp L, Stratmann T, Guilini K, Moodley L, van Oevelen D, Vanreusel A, Westerlund S and Sweetman AK (2017) Impaired Short-Term Functioning of a Benthic Community from a Deep Norwegian Fjord Following Deposition of Mine Tailings and Sediments. Front. Mar. Sci. 4:169. doi: 10.3389/fmars.2017.00169 Impaired Short-Term Functioning of a Benthic Community from a Deep Norwegian Fjord Fo...

Citation: Baselga-Cervera B, Romero-López J, García-Balboa C, Costas E and López-Rodas V (2018) Improvement of the Uranium Sequestration Ability of a Chlamydomonas sp. (ChlSP Strain) Isolated From Extreme Uranium Mine Tailings Through Selection for Potential Bioremediation Application. Front. Microbiol. 9:523. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2018.00523 Improvement of the Uranium Sequestration Ability of a C...

Secondary jarosite and water-soluble iron-sulfate minerals control the composition of acid mine waters formed by the oxidation of sulfide in tailings impoundments at the (Zn-Pb-Ag) Pan de Azúcar mine located in the Pozuelos Lagoon Basin (semi-arid climate) in Northwest (NW) Argentina. In the primary zone of the tailings (9.5 wt % pyrite-marcasite) precipitation of anglesite (PbSO4), wupatkite (...

Phytostabilization is a remediation technology that uses plants for in-situ stabilization of contamination in soils and mine tailings. The objective of this study was to identify native plant species with potential for phytostabilization of the abandoned mine tailings in Nacozari, Sonora in northern Mexico. A flora of 42 species in 16 families of angiosperms was recorded on the tailings site an...

Mine tailings from copper mines are considered as one of the sources of highly hazardous acid mine drainage (AMD) due to bio-oxidation of its sulfidic constituents. This study was designed to understand microbial community composition and potential for acid generation using samples from mine tailings of Malanjkhand copper project (MCP), India through 16S rRNA gene based amplicon sequencing appr...