PROMT: Philippines Remediation of Mine Tailings

We have assembled a team of interdisciplinary Philippine and UK researchers and industrial partners to build an innovative research programme to test sustainable tailings management, remediation and rehabilitation. Our ambitions are to produce tailings with less water consumption and greater stability and show how they can be monitored and adaptively managed in real time; and to enable the processing of modern and legacy tailings to recover more metals, whilst decontaminating them, encouraging rehabilitation and long-term stabilisation and re-use of the associated ecosystem services. The potential outcomes, impacts and benefits of this integrated research will be reduced community and environmental impacts from tailings, greater compliance with international standards, improved social license to operate for mining companies, reduced long term liabilities and risks from legacy sites, and potential sources of revenue by secondary extraction of additional metals and land re-use.

The world is moving to a low carbon economy that requires a greater amount and variety of metals from mining. The Philippines is the fifth most mineral-rich country in the world and therefore stands to benefit from this increased demand. However, mines can negatively impact on the environment and surrounding communities. Mining and mineral processing consume and contaminate water; have a large CO2 footprint; and compete with local communities for land and ecosystem services. They also produce waste - uneconomic volumes of rock, and wet slurries of finely-ground minerals left over from processing, known as tailings in large quantities.

Recent disasters caused by the failure of tailings storage facilities (TSF) have brought extra scrutiny to the management of operational and legacy TSF. In the Philippines, with rugged topography, high rainfall including typhoons, and regular seismic events, TSF remain at risk of failure, and continue to discharge contaminated water downstream. These issues not only affect operational mines - legacy tailings at abandoned or closed mine sites are persistent environmental hazards. Only with innovation will new sustainable standards for TSF management be achieved. Through our proposed large project, we will deliver the fundamental science to underpin such innovation, integrating interdisciplinary expertise and novel ideas in the fields of geophysical tomographic monitoring, environmentally-benign solvents, in situ reprocessing, engineered nanomaterials, geomicrobiology, phytoremediation, soil development and materials characterisation.

Our Partnership and Project Development grant objectives are to:
1. Identify the optimum field sites in which to perform the project work and secure access and permissions. This will include reviews of Philippines metallophytes (metal-tolerant and sometimes metal accumulating plants); Philippine ores, mine waste materials and tailings; and modelling the parameters needed for in situ geophysical monitoring of tailings and how leaching fluids will flow.
2. Refine the project involving stakeholders through: Examining the different technologies involved and their interactions and develop methodologies; Exploring the facilities and capabilities available at partners and identifying opportunities for knowledge exchange and capacity building; Developing a management plan; Completing our team.
3. Carry out engagement with a range of non-mining stakeholders to understand their needs and to strategically communicate our project aims and impact.
4. Network with other PPD projects.
5. Examine novel approaches and technologies for remote collaboration.