Global advancements in the management and treatment of acid mine drainage

Abstract

Acid mine drainage (AMD) is a mining-associated environmental problem that mainly pollutes water resources worldwide, making it imperative to find sustainable remediation solutions. To find effective treatment solutions for AMD, it will be beneficial to understand how this area of research has evolved over the years. Thus, this work provides a bibliometric analysis and narrative review of previous research articles that have focused on AMD treatment and management over the past 47 years and highlights the associated challenges and how to overcome them. Research articles addressing the treatment and management of AMD were retrieved from the Scopus database, using specific search criteria. The Scopus Analyze Tool and VOSviewer were used to analyze the publications to provide information on the publication distribution, countries of publication, authorship, keywords, field of study, and author affiliations, while the narrative review provides an overview of how AMD treatment technologies have evolved over these years. The top ten most published countries are developed countries except for South Africa (ranking number 4). This review revealed that several approaches have been developed for AMD treatment and management. It was observed that AMD treatment methods have not drastically changed over the years. Instead, earlier treatment techniques are being improved to develop new and more effective ones. The most recent remediation approach involves the valorization of AMD for the recovery of new materials in economically viable amounts. This is a sustainable approach to AMD treatment; however, it comes with challenges that can be overcome through more research in this area.