Rehabilitation of small scale mined out areas
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Date
2008
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Abstract
Rehabilitation of mined out areas provides ecological, economic and social benefits to the community, and non rehabilitated disturbed areas deprive communities from benefiting from their land after mining. In order for communities to benefit from their land after mining, it is necessary for small scale mining companies to rehabilitate their mined out areas. Hardly do small scale mining companies rehabilitate their mined oat areas even though Section eight (8) of the Environmental Permit for small scale mining requires that the company should backfill pits and conduct concurrent reclamation whenever possible and the Section ten (10) also indicates that during abandonment, companies are expected to rehabilitate the site to a condition consistent with the preexisting character and utility of the area. The inability of these miners to undertake this task could be due to several factors, among which is the dearth of knowledge in the cost of rehabilitating their mined out areas. The research determined the cost estimate of rehabilitating a twenty five acres (25 acres) or ten hectares (10 ha) of land normally allocated to small scale miners and identified indigenous and exotic species that are suitable for reclaiming small scale mined out areas and also, made appropriate recommendations.
A model was developed by using the data on the cost of rehabilitating and monitoring of one hectare degraded land to serve as a guide for small scale miners to estimate the cost of rehabilitating the whole of the 25 - acre (10 ha) of land normally allocated to them.
To ascertain the species’ suitability for rehabilitation of small scale mined out areas, a set of sixteen species which included four exotic and twelve indigenous species were planted on waste dump and tailings dam, where liquid waste containing had been discharged. Their growths were determined by measuring their diameters at breast height (dbh) over a period of eighteen months (November 2003 - May 2005). Two of the exotic species (Acacia mangium and Albizia lebbeck) could be interplanted with four of the indigenous species (Terminalia ivorensis, Term inalia superba, Antiaris toxicaria and Ceiba pentandra) since they thrive well on degraded lands.
It was recommended that progressive rehabilitation should be encouraged and small scale mining companies should post reclamation bond that could be used in the rehabilitation of abandoned mined sites.
Description
A Thesis submitted to the Department of Materials Engineering
Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science, 2008