Sustainability and Mine Water Management
Sustainability is a requirement by the authorities and local communities for mining companies to get a license to operate. Sustainability includes different aspects, and environmentally friendly mining is one of those.
Environmental mining includes mitigation of the footprint of mine, dust prevention, end-of-mining actions and mine water management. Mining is very often done by a flotation recovery method which is very water-intensive process since every ton of ore requires about three tons of water. Due to environmental reasons, mines do want to keep freshwater intake and outgoing water flows as small as possible and circulate process water inside the mine area as much as possible.
Water management at a mine site can be helped by Epsilon Xflow by two ways: first when circulated water is processed by a water treatment equipment, the Xflow can monitor elemental compositions in different stages of the water treatment process. It also enables the recovery of valuable metals when it is economically viable. Read our previous blog for more information.
Secondly, when possible Epsilon Xflow can be also used to monitor low concentrations of elements in out-going water streams. In such situation Epsilon Xflow can produce early warning signals and is used in environmental management purpose at the mine site.
Watch this video and see how GTK improves today’s mine water management using the Malvern Panalytical’s Epsilon Xflow.
Further reading: