Hello Friends,
When we think about Mining we visualise heavy loaders or big trucks or heavy equipments.but do you know besides this big-big machines some small-small microorganisms also helps in mining just like earthworms for farmer and like squirrels in Ramayana helps Lord Rama to build the bridge.
One of the biggest mining company Vale is researching on copper eating bacteria to recover copper from tailings. In Mining industry ores are processed to separate metals from waste. however after some extent when it is not either not possible or not feasible to further recover metal so they are treated as tailings and disposed to tailing dams.
Vale along with BNDES and university of SaoPaulo is researching for copper eating bactaria.These bactaria will be blended to the tailings which will eat copper from these waste and that copper can be recovered from bacteria, reprocess it and sold to market.According to Vale its Sessego mine tailing dam contains 90 million tons of 0.07% of copper grade detritus which due to its low grade cannot be recovered. so if this project get success all of this copper can be recovered which would value approx US$ 1.4 billions.this method is more popular as Bioleaching.
One another concern why mining companies is researching on this is that Bioleaching is more cleaner than other traditional method of recovering metals which require use of hazardous chemicals which may affect environment.
To know more about this visit following link
- http://www.vale.com/en/aboutvale/initiatives/copper-eating-bacteria/Pages/default.aspx
- http://revistapesquisa.fapesp.br/en/2012/10/20/microbes-that-mine/
- Bioleaching - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hope you will enjoy reading this!
Regards,
Pratik