Dnipro University of Technology — Compliance with the Time

Raising Knowledge among Students and Teachers on Tailings Safety
and its Legislative Review in Ukraine

TMF PROBLEM SIGNIFICANCE

The last two decades demonstrated a growing concern on environmental degradation caused by large-scale movement of hazardous materials as a result of failures of tailings management facilities (TMFs) where large amounts of mining wastes are stored. These wastes pose serious threats to humans and the environment, especially if tailings facilities are improperly designed, constructed, operated or managed.

Ukraine is an illustrative example of inappropriate storage of mining wastes. The vast majority of more than 35 billion tons of mining wastes in the country are stored in obsolete or abandoned facilities not meeting modern safety requirements, so these TMFs became a source of environment contamination, which damages biota and has negative after-effects to human health. The country continues to accumulate different types of waste. Most of them are generated in industry and mining and include associated overburden, sludge, mineral processing products, smelter slag, etc. Around 85% of all industrial waste comes from primary mining and enriching cycle and accumulates in heaps, dumps and sludge depositories.

Large amountsof these storages located in Donetsk and Lviv-Volynskyi coal basins, Kryvyi Rig iron ore basins and other regions cover the area of over 160 thousand hectares (National report On Technogenic and Natural Security in Ukraine).

Failures at TMFs may result in uncontrolled spills and releases of hazardous tailings materials. The negative impacts of such incidents on humans and the environment and severe transboundary consequences have been demonstrated by accidents in many countries including EC countries. The most known accidents in last two decades occurred at tailings in Baia Mare, Romania (2000), aluminium sludge tailings in Ajka, Hungary (2010), at the Talvivaara Mining Company in Finland (2012), at the Germano iron-ore mine near the town of Mariana in Minas Gerais state, south-eastern Brazil (2015), at the mining city Ridder, East of Kazakhstan (2016).

In 1983 potash fertilizers were released in the Dniester River at Stebnikovskiy plant Polimineral in Western Ukraine.

In 2008 due to a dam failure waste products were again dumped from potash fertilizers tailings at theKalush chemical plant into Dniester, which caused the concern of Government of the Republic of Moldova. In January 2011, the tails had dried up at the alumina refinery plant near the city of Mykolaiiv (Southern Ukraine) and stored wastes were dispersing as dry red dust. The topsoil, atmosphere, ground and surface water, settlements were affected over the area of tens of square kilometres.

Many efforts have been undertaken by the international expert community to improve TMF safety. Nevertheless, tailings in many countries still urgently need taking safety measures with special attention to the increase knowledge in this area of responsible persons. Addressing this problem, within the framework of the project of German Environment Agency (UBA) Improving the safety of industrial tailings management facilities based on the example of Ukrainian facilities (2013-2015) the Ukrainian team technically and scientifically managed by German Environment Agency and leading international experts has developed the Methodology for improving TMF safety based on the checklist approach. The developed TMF Methodology can be used as the practical tool to implement UNECE TMF Safety Guidelines and contribute to improving the safety of hazardous industrial sites subject to Directives 2006/21/EC and 2012/18/EC.

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