Barton's mining tailings reuse project finishes first year

A three-year, multi-university project to assess critical metal content in Arizona’s copper mine tailings has completed its first year. The $3.6 million Arizona Board of Regents’ Research Grant aims to find ways to reuse copper tailings, the waste rock left behind after mining the ore.

“The extraordinary volumes of leftover rock from copper mining make reprocessing copper tailings a world-class challenge and opportunity for Arizona,” said MGE assistant professor Isabel Barton, principal investigator for the grant. “This large-scale interdisciplinary project represents a substantial first step toward making use of a massive, but undeveloped, potential resource.” 

Barton is working with a dozen faculty and staff in nine departments across all three Arizona public universities. Using cutting-edge methods, the research groups are mapping out the mineralogy of each tailings facility. The remote sensing team, led by School of Mining and Mineral Resources Research Scientist Dean Riley, has been using data from drones, airplanes, and satellites to spot tailings facilities and identify the minerals they contain. And to peek inside of them: Ben McKeeby at Northern Arizona University has been flying drones equipped with ground-penetrating radar, thermophysical instrumentation, and more to look at the 3-d characteristics of some of the tailings sites.

The results will help show what minerals are present, how different particle sizes are distributed, and what the subsurface structure of each facility looks like.