Development of the Swampy forest system for passive treatment of acid mine drainage during post mining land reclamation: A new concept review

摘要

One of the big challenges in coal mining is how to improve the treatment of acid mine drainage (AMD) where the outflow water is acid and usually has a high concentration of heavy metals. Commonly costs of around USD 0.04 per m3 acid water of AMD to comply with legislative regulations when active treatments are used for the neutralizing process. We have developed a new concept of passive treatment to treat the AMD at a lower cost compared with active treatment and with much greater capacity to treat significantly more volume of AMD compared with the conventional passive treatment systems. Experiments to determine the role of a combination of organic matter, grass and trees species selected in one system of passive treatment, named Swampy Forest (SF)system, to treat the AMD are described in this article. SF system was shown to be an effective, efficient, and environmentally friendlier process in transforming mine wastewater that was incompliant value at inlet (before treatment) to become compliant at outlet from the treatment system before being released.