Treatment of explosives impacted mining wastewaters.******

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Mining is very important to Canada but it creates a number of environmental challenges. Milestone Environmental Inc. is extending their current water treatment portfolio into the mining environmental equipment/services sector. Accordingly, this company is seeking to develop a treatment system for water that becomes contaminated with the residuals of explosives. These mining wastewaters contain relatively high levels of ammonia, and due to ammonia toxicity to fish these waters cannot be discharged directly into rivers or lakes. Milestone hopes to develop a treatment system based on chloramination followed by sorption on catalytic activated carbon. Chloramination, which uses less chlorination and is faster than breakpoint chlorination, converts the ammonia to monochloramine. Newly developed catalytic activated carbons will then be used to sorb the chloramines and make the water to fish. Milestone hopes to patent the treatment system, but it needs to experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of the system. Milestone has contacted Dr. Narbaitz of the Dept. of Civil Engineering based on his expertise on water treatment and sorption processes to evaluate: a) the range of ammonia concentrations for which the process is practical; b) optimal chlorination pH for the subsequent sorption step; c) evaluate different activated carbon materials; and d) the activated carbon contact period required. The lab-scale study will involve multiple batch sorption experiments using pH adjusted chloraminated and a number of different types of activated carbons, catalytic as well as conventional activated carbon prepared from different materials.