Ecological assessment of coal mine and metal mine drainage in South Korea using Daphnia magna bioassay.

Sang-Ho Lee,Injeong Kim,Byung-Tae Lee,Kyoung-Woong Kim

doi:10.1186/s40064-015-1311-1

Sang-Ho Lee, Injeong Kim + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1186/s40064-015-1311-1

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Journal: SpringerPlus	Publication Date: Sep 17, 2015
Citations: 16	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology

Abstract

In order to assess the ecological effect of acid mine drainage, metal mine (Dalsung) and coal mine (Samtan) drainage in South Korea were collected. The each mine drainage then investigated by whole effluent toxicity test (WET) and toxicity identification evaluation (TIE). WET results demonstrated that DS leachate and ST mine water is more toxic than other mine drainage due to the presence of cationic metals and acidic pH. TIE results revealed that the acidic pH and copper (Cu) could be the main toxicants in both mine drainage. The strong acidic pH (pH < 3.5) enhanced the metal toxicity by increase of metal activity and bioavailability. The toxicity of most mine drainage revealed that the positive correlation between metal concentration and toxicity unit (TU). The regression data between TU and sum of cumulative criterion unit (CCU) demonstrated the reasonable statistical significance (R = 0.89; p < 0.01), however the excessive iron concentration in mine drainage could be an inhibition factor to estimate the toxicity by the effect of amorphous iron precipitate.

Highlights

Acid mine drainage (AMD) is acidic sulfur-rich wastewater created from mine areas by the oxidation of sulfidic minerals (Gazea et al 1996; Nordstrom and Alpers 1999; Johnson and Hallberg 2005; Kalin et al 2006)
The US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) has standardized the assessment methodology for using Daphnia magna; they suggest the use of whole effluent toxicity test (WET) and toxicity identification evaluation (TIE) methods to estimate the biological assessment of contaminated water such as industrial wastewater and AMD (US Environmental Protection Agency 2002)
Dalsung mine (DS)-2 showed a significant reduction of iron concentration in the effluent, whereas there was no significant difference in pH, EC, total dissolved solids (TDS), metal concentration rather than mine water (DS-1)

Summary

Introduction

Acid mine drainage (AMD) is acidic sulfur-rich wastewater created from mine areas by the oxidation of sulfidic minerals (Gazea et al 1996; Nordstrom and Alpers 1999; Johnson and Hallberg 2005; Kalin et al 2006). In order to assess the negative impacts of AMD, conventional chemical measurement such as pH, conductivity, and metal and anion concentrations have been applied, as they can be compared based on the concentration difference of the components (Gray 1997). The TIE method can be used to identify the main cause of toxicity, in which the procedures consist of the fractionation of wastewater by either physical and/or chemical manipulations Both WET and TIE have been successfully applied to identify toxicants in industrial wastewater and environmental samples (Villamar et al 2011; de Melo et al 2013)

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