Stabilizing Tailings with Microbes

The Challenge

Tailings, a common byproduct of mining, often contain toxic material that can pose significant environmental and health risks. These facilities can produce hazardous dust spread by wind, causing health problems for surrounding communities and the environment. Tailings ponds almost always require extensive engineering to ensure they are stable to keep the mine site and nearby communities safe from dam failures.

Current mitigation strategies include adding water and chemicals to the tailings at active mine sites, and using covers, re-vegetation, or other long-term active-control measures at legacy sites. These methods are time intensive, costly, require significant amounts of water, and have limited effectiveness.

More effective and efficient solutions are needed to stabilize tailings to reduce detrimental impacts on ecosystems and nearby communities.

The Solution

Certain microbes have the ability to solidify the materials found in tailings, producing a natural cement. This process, called biocementation, is an environmentally friendly, cost effective, and more durable solution to stabilize tailings than current methods.

Putting microbes with biocementation capabilities to work is an emerging strategy for controlling fugitive dust from tailings. Even better, microbes with these capabilities are often already present in tailings. Biocementation has been shown to strengthen and stabilize soil, sand, and concrete. Further, heavy metals co-precipitate with the cemented soil, reducing their toxicity to surrounding environments.

Identifying and cultivating the native microbes with biocementation capabilities can serve as a more effective and environmentally friendly solution for tailings storage.

Koonkie’s Approach

Koonkie's team of biologists, bioinformaticians, and computer scientists have the highly-specific expertise required to identify these rare microbes with biocementation capabilities. Koonkie uses DNA sequencing to decode which microbes are present in samples and sorts through huge amounts of data to find the organisms with relevant metabolic pathways for stabilization. This method can serve as a more efficient, effective, and environmentally friendly method for tailings stabilization.

Want to learn more? Reach out to services@koonkie.com to schedule a consultation.

Reference: 

1. Anbu et al. SpringerPlus (2016)

2. Achal et al. Ecological Engineering (2011)

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