Rehabilitation plan for coal pit revegetation area East Kalimantan

Abstract

The degraded mining area, especially the disposal area, must be reclaimed to preserve the possibility of its subsequent use in the future. The open pit rehabilition must ensure post-mining contributes powerfully to the ecosystem by restoring the production capacity and stability of the area. The exercise was applied to a nearly 0.5 Ha of open-pit coal mine conducted in cooperation between Korea and Indonesia to create a production forest that can ultimately support the environment. The objective of this work was to design mine pit reclamation plan through characterization physically and chemically the location by regenerating, checking the drainage system, analyzing soil fertility and the possibility of soil contamination and discovering fast growing local crop and forest plant species. The main focus is more on analyzing the soil condition affected by the acid mine drainage problem. The results showed that the northern restoration target site had the steep slope, characterized as acidic soil (pH was 4.2 – 4.6) with low exchangeable cation and low phosphate availability. The heavy metals did not exceed the contamination limit, so separate processing to prevent leaching of heavy metals is not required. Routine monitoring of the drainage system is important because it will affect the watering frequency and leaching control. Understanding the step by step mine rehabilitation can assist in designing reclamation efforts especially for revegetation purpose.