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Inside a lab at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, soil samples sit under a row of a glowing light bulbs hanging from a track only a short distance above them. In another room, a centrifuge hums as beakers of Nyquil-colored liquids sit on a nearby shelf. Standard white lab coats hang on hooks outside.
This generic-looking lab feels worlds away from the gritty, dusty mines of Australia—but this is where scientists hope to chart a new path for the industry here, and across the world.
If work being done at the Centre for Mined Land Rehabilitation catches on, it could mean new futures for global communities affected by resource-hungry strip-mining, and new ways for the mining industry to do business.
Australian scientists hope to accomplish this with phytomining—harvesting valuable metals from plants. Essentially, it’s growing plants containing nickel, zinc and cobalt—the bread and butter of the world’s mines, and harvesting the metals above ground, not below.
“We have identified a whole lot of new species which could be used for phytomining which weren’t previously known to science,” said Dr. Peter Erskine, one of the researchers working to make the process suitable for conventional mining companies.
So far, Erskine and his colleague Dr. Antony van der Ent, have discovered about 25 species of plants called ‘hyperaccumulators’ that take up high concentrations of metals from soil, that could form phytomining farms.
Erskine and van der Ent’s latest experiments with phytomining in remote northern Borneo show just how useful the emerging mining practice can be. It’s there that some of these hyperaccumulators thrive in soils rich in nickel. Just one mature tree of the right species can contain up to 11 pounds of nickel.
“I think nickel is the most promising type of metal for phytomining because it’s worth quite a bit of money—almost $20,000 per ton—and, there are very strong hyperaccumulators known for nickel,” van der Ent said.
So planting these hyperaccumulators in land that has already been strip-mined in places like the tropics, where the leftover soil is still rich in nickel but not worth exploiting through conventional mining, could allow for a new future for these otherwise barren areas.
“Stripping mining is pretty devastating for landscapes,” van der Ent said. “You essentially end up with land that’s not useful for many things. The soil is very nutrient-poor, so it’s very difficult to do any normal agriculture on it.”
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