CeBER attend WISA MWD Symposium 2016

CeBER’s Prof Sue Harrison, Dr Marijke Fagan-Endres and Dr Rob van Hille all recently attended the 2016 Water Institute of South Africa Mine Water Division (WISA MWD) Symposium as invited speakers. The conference, held on 9-10 November at the CSIR ICC in Pretoria, aims to bring together industry, government and researchers to build knowledge, further good practice and share new information on Management Options For Mine Water, this year’s theme.

Their talks each presented the findings of three of Water Research Commission (WRC) funded projects being carried out at CeBER. The projects represent work done by numerous CeBER researchers, affiliates and students over the past few years.

Prof Harrison’s talk – entitled “An industrial ecology approach to sulphide containing mineral wastes to minimise ARD formation” – showcased a robust and holistic methodology by which mineral wastes can be valorised, thereby removing the risk associated with such ores. This focused on the two-stage flotation process for sulphide removal from South African coal fines and gold tailings that has been developed at UCT in conjunction with the Centre for Minerals Research (CMR). Dr Fagan-Endres then presented a follow-on investigation into the use of bioflotation reagents as potentially cheaper and more environmentally benign alternatives to conventional chemical options in the two-stage flotation process. Dr van Hille, a CeBER research associate now based at The Moss Group, spoke about the development of a flow-through channel reactor for the semi-passive biological treatment of high sulphate mining impacted waters which is currently undergoing pilot-scale trials on plant.

The talks were all well received and Dr Fagan-Endres and Dr van Hille’s session “Current Mine Water And Related Research” (including two other talks) was awarded best-of-conference.