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New Directions for Tailings Management

Tailings and Mine Waste Conference (2023 : Vancouver, B.C.); University of British Columbia. Norman B. Keevil Institute of Mining Engineering

The global mining industry anticipates that societal demands will drive increased annual production rates, and the world-wide concern for the potential consequences from conventional tailings dam failure will drive increased scrutiny. This paper will provide an update on new technologies and approaches to tailings management that are being pursued since the writing of the SME Tailings Management Handbook (Nelson, 2022). The paper presents approaches to “zero waste” mining, including in-situ mining to reduce tailings volume, advanced processing that reduces water requirements and minimizes reagents, upscale and downscale uses for tailings materials, mine waste remining for critical minerals and metals, and new materials manufactured from tailings. Zero waste operations will extend the value chain for the mining industry to engage the circular economy through downstream production of value-added products that minimize the need for tailings disposal. This paper reviews the variety of opportunities for tailings management such that the long-term social and environmental impacts and liability are reduced or become benefits, and for revenue generation through remining/reprocessing when extraction technology improves. The paper also identifies opportunities for innovations in tailings dewatering, including the potential for mass application of in-situ electrokinetics for legacy, inactive and operational conventional TSFs.

Text

2023-12-08

Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/86795

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/