Arsenic solubility, mobility and speciation in the deposits from a copper production waste storage

Abstract

The sediments in large pond for discharge of waste products of metallurgical activity were studied with respect to the valence forms of arsenic and its mobility. A sequential extraction procedure for arsenic compounds was applied and optimized according to the nature of analyzed products. During the first stage, the content of water-soluble arsenic compounds was determined, during the second—HCl-soluble forms and during the third—compounds soluble in sodium hydroxide. The optimum conditions for leaching arsenic from sediments (sample weight, concentration and volume of extractants, time of treatment) were established for each fraction. Speciation studies for determining As(III) and As(V) were carried out in the obtained arsenic extracts. The ability of the proposed sequential extraction procedure to specify the valence forms of inorganic arsenic was evaluated using model samples with added As(III) and As(V) and the recovery of spikes has been assessed. It was found that oxidation of As(III) and processes of sorption and sedimentation of As(V) proceed upon dissolution. A depth profiling was performed of the content of diverse forms of Às in two sites. The content of water-soluble As does not exceed 7.4% of total As in the sediments, As(III) being lower than 7.4% of that of the extracted As. The bulk of arsenic compounds (above 78% As) is dissolved in 2M HCl, and As(V) was found to be more than 94% of extracted arsenic. The analytical features of the procedure are as follow: precision, evaluated through the repeatability w > 0.96 and accuracy, estimated by the recovery above 93%, calculated on the basis of a twice repeated analysis of a series of 9 samples.