EVALUATING THE METAL MOBILITY FROM OPEN-DUMPED MINING WASTES IN KOSOVA: A COMPARISON OF THREE-STAGE BCR SEQUENTIAL EXTRACTION AND TOXICITY CHARACTERISTIC LEACHING TESTS

Worldwide, mining is an important segment of industrial development that had and still has serious environmental impacts. Trepça was the largest metallurgic and mining complex in Europe with a long history in silver, lead and zinc metallurgy. Because of the inefficiency of the past mineral processing technologies huge amount of waste materials sorted in the Mitrovica Industrial Park, which contain considerable amounts of zinc and other metal such as lead, cadmium, nickel, cooper, other precious metals remain. The weathering and acid nature of mining waste are favourable conditions in which metal ions that are present might become more soluble and mobile to the environment. In this work, the modified three-stage sequential extraction procedure Community Bureau of Reference (BCR) was applied for the fractionation of Zn, Pb, Ni, Cd, Cu and As in mining wastes from old Pb?Zn mining areas located in Mitrovica Industrial Park (Kosova). Analyses of the extracts were performed by inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry. The procedure was evaluated using a certified reference material, BCR-701. By comparing the obtained results of three BCR fractions and leaching tests (DIN 38414-S4 and Synthetic Precipitation Leaching Procedure (SPLP) Method 1312:1994) we can conclude that Zn is very distributed among all fractions, while Cd possesses the highest potential ecological risk factor. Therefore, the sequential extraction and leaching tests proved to be useful methods in providing information on mobility of metals in mining open-dumped sites in Kosova.