The IMPEL Mining Waste Management meeting took place on 3 and 4 February 2020 in Iglesias, Italy. Participants were experts and stakeholders from local authorities that work on mining waste management.
Principal goal of the project is to initiate guidelines and/or procedures for the recovery/reuse of mining waste as new raw materials sources by comparing the different experiences of the partners or invited participants. This topic is deeply felt in Italy, and in particular in Sardinia, due to the large quantities of extractive waste spread over the island during mining activities carried forward over the centuries. So, finding the procedures that may allow their conversion would be a great help for the extractive sector, both from an economic and environmental point of view.
A substantial part of the meeting was the fieldtrip, subdivided into two main stops, for the purpose of observing two storage facilities:
- The “fine basin of Masua”, that represents what remains of a “fine” settling basin that treated the materials extracted from various mines, among which the main ones are Masua, Nebida and Acquaresi. Before visiting the fine basin there has been the permit to go inside the galleries of Porto Flavia from which the materials were loaded directly onto the ships;
- The “Monteponi red mud heaps”, represent a structure consisting of mineralogical and metallurgical processes waste, with a lot of problems related to the release of pollutants and to the structural risk. In both surveys, the IGEA (a Region Sardinia owned company) technicians, which is the company in charge of wastes’ management explained the monitoring activities, the environmental problems, the planned interventions and their content of critical raw materials and pollutants.
You can read the meeting’s report here.