Potensi Penggunaan Abu Terbang Cangkang Sawit sebagai Adsorben Logam Arsen dari Air Limbah Tambang

Arsenic is a dangerous compound that accumulates in nature as a result of anthropogenic activities, one of which is gold mining. Effluent originating from the remaining mining is simply abandoned even though it contains Arsenic which is above the threshold set by the Government of the Republic of Indonesia. The purpose of this study was to analyze the ability of palm shell fly ash to remove arsenic in the residual gold mining effluent. The technology applied in this study was absorption by direct mixing followed by settling and filtering. The maximum arsenic removal efficiency achieved in this study was valued at 81.98%. The longer the contact time between the palm shell fly ash and the waste sample, the less the amount of Arsenic in the waste water will be. The results of this study indicate that the method of removing arsenic from wastewater using palm shell fly ash is very effective, easy to apply and cheap in terms of the cost required.

Reconstituted Mining Effluent Reduces Neuronal Proliferation in the Developing Brain and Slows Growth of Body and Facial Features in Wild-Caught Wood Frog Tadpoles

Mining, whether current or inactive, generally increases salt concentrations in catchment watersheds due to precipitation on and through exposed rock surfaces. Practices like mountaintop removal mining have exacerbated this issue, with measurements of salt concentrations in nearby catchment systems well above normal levels. Nevertheless, the impact of the ionic composition of mining effluent on aquatic animal health is not well understood. This is a particularly important issue in Appalachia because it is home to an enormous diversity of organisms, including a huge array of amphibians that live in streams that receive mining effluent from operating and abandoned mines. To investigate this issue, we examined the effects of reconstituted mining effluent on the development of wild-caught wood frog (Lithobates sylvaticus) tadpoles. We collected day-old fertilized eggs from a creek near Blacksburg, VA in early March, 2018 and raised them to hatch. Tadpoles were then assigned to either sulfate or chloride-based reconstituted mining effluent diluted to six different conductivities (100 μS/cm - 2,400 μS/cm). After 7 or 14 days of treatment, tadpoles were euthanized and fixed in paraformaldehyde. We imaged the heads and bodies of tadpoles for morphometric analysis before dissecting out brains and immunostaining them for phospho-histone H3, which labels dividing progenitor cells in the brain. We found that sulfate-based reconstituted mining effluent significantly lowered progenitor cell division at 1200 μS/cm at Day 7 and at 600 μS/cm at Day 14 relative to control. Chloride-based reconstituted mining effluent was less impactful, with no significant differences observed at Day 7 and significantly lowered progenitor cell division at 2400 μS/cm at Day 14. In addition, both treatments slowed growth of some head morphological features, including head size and interocular distance. Chloride treatment slowed growth of body length at Day 14 at 600 μS/cm, whereas sulfate-based reconstituted mining effluent had no effect on body length. These data show that sulfate-based mining effluent has a substantial impact on aspects of neural development, whereas chloride-based reconstituted mining effluent had less effect. In contrast, chloride-based reconstituted mining effluent had a much greater impact than sulfate on body morphology and growth. These experiments demonstrate that the chemical composition of salts in mining effluent can have divergent effects on the development of amphibians.