Nowadays it is quite difficult to find relevant data about the composition of mining effluents from abandoned mines around Europe. This lack of information limits our current knowledge about the real environmental impact caused by these polluting effluents and the versality of the current management strategies.
In this line, the preparatory Action A.2 of the LIFE DEMINE project aimed to develop an extensive database containing the composition of several mining effluents from abandoned mines across Europe. After the completion of the Action A.2, the created database contains 5618 data sets from 90 different European mining sites (https://mon.uvic.cat/life-demine/2018/04/26/a-complete-mining-effluent-database-has-been-created/). This database reveals a huge variability in the composition of mining effluents across Europe, which evidences the need to continue working on its elaboration.
With this aim, an open mining effluent questionnaire have been created to collect relevant data of different mining effluents, focusing mainly in abandoned mines, but also including active mining activities. All the stakeholders interested in providing information can give it through the form that can be found on the following page https://mon.uvic.cat/life-demine/mining-effluent-database/.