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Immobilization of mercury in tailings originating from the historical artisanal and small-scale gold mining using sodium polysulfide

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Abstract

A series of sodium polysulfides (SPSs) with different sulfur indexes was prepared as stabilizers to amend elemental mercury-contaminated artisanal small-scale gold mine (ASGM) tailings in Hubei, China, by controlling the molar ratio of sulfur and sodium sulfides as 1:1, 2:1, 3:1, and 4:1 during the synthesis. XRD, XPS, and laser Raman spectroscopy all suggested that the synthesized SPSs were a mixture of multiple polysulfides, sulfur, sodium sulfides, and sodium thiosulfate. Based on toxicity characteristic leaching procedure test (TCLP), mercury stabilization efficiency of SPSs was evaluated and proved to be more superior than sulfur, sodium sulfide, and also calcium polysulfide, with an optimal stabilization efficiency of 97.16% at SPS/THg = 1:2, SPSs pH = initial pH, and liquid-to-solid ratio = 20:7. A pseudo-second-order kinetic model was able to interpret the stabilization kinetics and demonstrated that mercury stabilization rate increased with the sulfur index in the SPSs, but excess SPSs were potentially to inhibit the precipitation of mercury. Speciation analysis results determined with sequential extraction indicated that the unstable mercury, elemental mercury, and organic-bound mercury fractions decreased respectively by up to 88.6%, 53.5%, and 26.3%. Pearson correlation analysis showed that the mercury stabilization in the mine tailings amended with SPSs mainly occurs from the precipitation of the elemental mercury, and the organic mercury fraction reduction was correlated with the decrease of the unstable mercury.

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Funding

This work was partly funded by the Sustainable Development Science and Technology Fund of Shenzhen (no. KCXFZ202002011009145), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, China University of Geosciences (Wuhan) (no. CUG192716), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 41902253).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Environmental Studies, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, 430074, China

    Yu Wang, Danqing Liu & Yilian Li

  2. Yangtze Ecology and Environment Co. Ltd, Wuhan, 430062, China

    Zhiqiang Luo

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  1. Yu Wang
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  4. Yilian Li
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Contributions

YW—conceptualization, formal analysis, visualization, writing (original draft).

ZL—formal analysis, investigation, data curation.

DL—conceptualization, investigation, resources, data curation, writing (review and editing), supervision, funding acquisition.

YL—conceptualization, writing (review and editing), supervision, funding acquisition.

All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Danqing Liu.

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Wang, Y., Luo, Z., Liu, D. et al. Immobilization of mercury in tailings originating from the historical artisanal and small-scale gold mining using sodium polysulfide. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 56562–56578 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-19569-1

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