Disproportionate Water Quality Impacts from the Century-Old Nautanen Copper Mines, Northern Sweden

Sandra Fischer, Gunhild Rosqvist, Sergey R. Chalov and Jerker Jarsjö
Additional contact information
Sandra Fischer: Department of Physical Geography, Stockholm University, 10691 Stockholm, Sweden
Gunhild Rosqvist: Department of Physical Geography, Stockholm University, 10691 Stockholm, Sweden
Sergey R. Chalov: Faculty of Geography, M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University Leninskie Gory 1, 119991 Moscow, Russia
Jerker Jarsjö: Department of Physical Geography, Stockholm University, 10691 Stockholm, Sweden

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 4, 1-15

Abstract: Pollution from small historical mining sites is usually overlooked, in contrast to larger ones. Especially in the Arctic, knowledge gaps remain regarding the long-term mine waste impacts, such as metal leakage, on water quality. We study the small copper (Cu) mines of Nautanen, northern Sweden, which had been in operation for only six years when abandoned approximately 110 years ago in 1908. Measurements from field campaigns in 2017 are compared to synthesized historical measurement data from 1993 to 2014, and our results show that concentrations of Cu, Zn, and Cd on-site as well as downstream from the mining site are order(s) of magnitude higher than the local background values. This is despite the small scale of the Nautanen mining site, the short duration of operation, and the long time since closure. Considering the small amount of waste produced at Nautanen, the metal loads from Nautanen are still surprisingly high compared to the metal loads from larger mines. We argue that disproportionately large amounts of metals may be added to surface water systems from the numerous small abandoned mining sites. Such pollution loads need to be accounted for in sustainable assessments of total pollutant pressures in the relatively vulnerable Arctic environment.

Keywords: abandoned mines; mine waste; metal mass flows; Arctic (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/4/1394/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/4/1394/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:4:p:1394-:d:320257

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().