Mine Tailings & Waste

Mining engineers have developed clever ways of waste management, making the mining industry one of the few that actively recycle their own waste. Overburden is used for reprocessing, contouring land, and as a construction aggregate for buildings and roads. Mine tailings are reused for producing clay, tiles, glass, and concrete.

Tailings are the leftover materials or the wastes generated from mining operations, and its disposal can be a major problem. After we’ve separated the uneconomic fraction of the mineral ore known as the gangue, essentially anything that is not the material that we are looking to extract. Tailings primarily consist of dewatered pulverized rock, dirt, and gravel—and the material is viscous, dense, abrasive, and may even be considered hazardous. That’s why when the tailings are removed, they need to be managed.

Tailings and gangue must be collected, transported, or dispersed into tailings storage facilities, or collection ponds or dams, depending on the terminology of the part of the world that you’re in. This mining waste has no economic benefit or use, so it doesn’t need to be stored for the life of the mine. In the event that the tailings can’t be effectively separated from the mining process, the entire mining operation can grind to a halt, making the management of tailings very important. Also, if not managed responsibly, tailings can pose potential risks to human health and safety, the environment, infrastructure, and to mining companies themselves.

Tailings requires effective management just to make the operation work cost-effectively. While the tailings risk is unlikely to affect the actual mining effort; a collapsed tailings dam can destroy the mine’s value, as well as a company’s reputation and license to operate.

Due to the way minerals are processed, tailings can contain concentrations of processing chemicals. This can make mine tailings an environmental concern, so proper transportation and disposal are crucial. Consequently, the next step is to pump mine tailings away with slurry pumps into tailings ponds.

In the past, reclamation of abandoned tailing ponds was seldom practiced by mining companies. At present, however, state laws in most mining states require some form of reclamation once a tailing pond has served its useful life.

Valves play a critical role in the transportation and the disbursement of tailings. Because tailings are very abrasive and often corrosive, valves used on tailing lines must be able to withstand this challenge and remain operational for long periods of time. When adding pressure, density, and velocity, tailings transportation becomes an arduous environment for a valve to operate in, and the remote location of many tailings ponds means that reliability and low maintenance are extremely critical since access is inconvenient.