Andrew Butler

Eco Logical Australia

A critical element of the rehabilitation strategy for the Ok Tedi mine in Papua New Guinea (PNG) is the rehabilitation of the potentially acid forming dredge sand stockpiles at Bige on the banks of the Ok Tedi. Successful long-term mitigation of Acid Rock Drainage (ARD) involves placing a geochemical cover layer over the PAF waste and rehabilitatio...

The progressive development of regulatory requirements and controls (regulatory creep) over the life of an operation can result in environmental monitoring programs with no clear purpose and inefficiencies in data collection and research efforts. This is particularly the case where rehabilitation completion criteria are ill-defined or ambiguous, as...

Within Australia, and arguably more widely, there is a dearth of mine site rehabilitation that has been validated as successful against agreed objectives and targets. One reason for this is the absence of accepted design life and durability standards, applied during the planning and design of major mine wastes landforms such as tailings storage fac...

Despite extensive knowledge of the rehabilitation process and component parts, and contrary to numerous publications, demonstrations of successful mine rehabilitation outcomes are scarce. Haymont (2012) for example notes that in some parts of Australia there are significant areas of mining disturbance that cannot be relinquished. One reason for thi...

Mount Margaret Mine (MMM) is located near Cloncurry in NW Queensland. Copper/gold/magnetite ore was mined from several open pits and processed at Ernest Henry Mine (EHM). With no tailings dam, the main residual risk at MMM is the potential for off-site migration of acid mine drainage (AMD) or neutral mine drainage (NMD) from potentially acid formin...

A review of the international literature indicated that at least 15 additional cobalt toxicity studies had been published since 2000, sufficient to derive a high reliability cobalt Guideline Value (GV) using the protocols developed for the revision of the ANZECC/ARMCANZ Water Quality Guidelines (the Guidelines). This presented an opportunity to imp...

The progressive development of regulatory requirements and controls (regulatory creep) over the life of an operation can result in environmental monitoring programs with no clear purpose and inefficiencies in data collection and research efforts. This is particularly the case where rehabilitation completion criteria are ill-defined or ambiguous, as...

A fall in herbage production has been observed on Denbigh series soils in Wales after several years in permanent pasture. In practice this is shown as a poor response to fertiliser N. Under intensive grazing systems a zone of compaction develops at a depth of 8-12 cm. leading to shallow rooting and the appearence of stagnogley features in the surfa...

In the autumn of 1983, 5 wheel-compaction treatments, including zero traffic, lowground-pressure traffic, medium and heavy combine harvester and tractor traffic, were applied to a silt loam in southern England before direct drilling winter wheat. In the compact soil, crop establishment was more uniform than in the unwheeled soil, but wheeling did n...

In the autumn of 1983, five wheel-compaction treatments, including zero traffic, low-ground-pressure traffic, medium and heavy combine harvester traffic (maximum axle loads up to 13.2 t, maximum tyre inflation pressures up to 118 kPa) were applied to a silt loam soil before direct-drilling winter wheat. The soil had not been cultivated in the prece...