U.S. Water News Online
SALT LAKE CITY -- Kennecott Utah Copper Corp. is transforming piles of waste rock and tailings ponds into more natural terrain and building groundwater treatment plants to clean up a century of mining.
The company spent $3.2 million on reclamation in 2005, officials said in an annual briefing for the Utah Board of Oil, Gas and Mining. That doesn't include a cleanup Kennecott did for Daybreak, a planned community where the company scooped up 3 million square yards of soil.
Daybreak is under construction near the Salt Lake suburb of South Jordan, the first in a series of communities planned on company land that stretches 20 miles along the Oquirrh mountains, which frame the west side of the Salt Lake valley. It has sold nearly 800 houses already, about half of them occupied and the rest under construction.
Kennecott is reclaiming hundreds of acres and launching into real estate even as it continues to claw into the world's largest man-made hole, Bingham Mine. The mine's deposit of ore is expected to last decades, and it has already yielded enough copper to wire every house in North America.
A 1978 agreement with Utah required Kennecott to spend at least $50,000 a year, equal to more than $150,000 today, reclaiming spent mining lands. Environmental groups generally praise Kennecott for its stewardship, and the company drew no criticism from neighbors at the hearing.
The reclamation "runs as long as we're operating. It's a continual project,'' Kennecott engineer Vicky Peacey told the state board.
At $3.2 million last year, Kennecott spent more than 20 times what's required of it under the 1978 contract with the state.
Peacey said the work involves re-grading piles of waste rock up to 400 feet high into more natural contours. It's adding a soil amendment and organic fertilizer so that native grasses, shrubs and trees, like mountain mahogany, quaking aspen and Austrian pine, can take hold on the rocky ground. It's turning parts of a huge tailings pile near Great Salt Lake into a grassy meadow that has attracted burrowing owls, foxes, coyotes -- and a single antelope so far.
Kennecott also is building one reverse-osmosis plant and helping a local water district build a second treatment plant, to clean groundwater high in sulfates to tap-water standards, said Paula Doughty, Kennecott's director of environmental affairs.
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