What impact do you think tailings have on the environment at present?

The impact of tailings on the natural environment is reflected in:

1. Tailings have been worn during mineral processing, with reduced weight and large surface area, which are easy to flow and collapse during storage, causing vegetation destruction and personal injury accidents, especially in rainy season. With the increasing number of tailings ponds, the dam height of tailings ponds also increases, and the unsafe hidden dangers are increasing. There have been dozens of accidents in China, 7 of which caused personal injuries and nearly 300 people died. The most serious one was the dam-break accident of Dagudu tailings pond in Yunxi, where 3.68 million tons of tailings and mud poured downstream like a mudslide, burying 1 10,000 mu of farmland and villages, causing nearly 200 casualties and causing the concentrator to stop production for three years. However, in dry and windy seasons and regions, tailings dust flies to the area around tailings dam under strong wind, causing soil pollution, land degradation and even making surrounding residents sick.

2. The composition of tailings and the residual mineral processing chemicals have seriously damaged the ecological environment, especially the tailings containing heavy metals, in which sulfide produces acid water to further leach heavy metals, and its loss will cause harm to the whole ecological environment. Toxic and harmful chemicals, such as chloride, cyanide, sulfide, pine oil, flocculant, surfactant, etc. , stay in the tailings. When tailings are stored for a long time, they will be influenced by air, moisture and sunlight and interact with each other to produce harmful gas or acidic water, which will aggravate the loss of heavy metals in tailings, destroy crop growth or pollute crops after flowing into cultivated land. Inflow into the water system will pollute the surface water body and underground water source and poison aquatic organisms; Tailings flowing into or discharged into rivers and lakes will not only poison aquatic organisms, but also cause other disasters, sometimes even involving quite long rivers. At present, the area of land directly polluted by tailings in China has reached one million mu, and the area of land secondarily polluted has exceeded 65.438 billion mu.

A large number of tailings have become an important factor restricting the sustainable development of mining industry and endangering the ecological environment of mining area and its surrounding areas. Looking at the severe challenges encountered in mining development, the fundamental way to solve the problem is to rely on the development and utilization of secondary resources, and the comprehensive utilization of tailings is an inevitable choice for the sustainable development of mining industry.