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Strategies for rehabilitating mercury- contaminated mining lands for renewable energy and other self-sustaining re-use strategies. Output 1. An onsite field testing plan for techniques that promise to be replicable to other similarly contaminated sites, based on technology evaluations and bench scale test work.
The UK Prosperity Fund project in Colombia on Strategies for rehabilitating mercurycontaminated mining lands for renewable energy and other self-sustaining re-use strategies ran from mid-2016 until early 2017. It intended to deliver change by providing a range of science based strategies to rehabilitate mining sites affected by soil mercury pollution in disadvantaged areas and bring them back into productive use focusing on renewable energy opportunities and/or other services as most appropriate. It also supported the Foreign and Commonwealth Office goals of increasing regional stability, facilitating sustainable economic growth, harnessing innovation in particular for low carbon development, supporting OECD accession, and identifying possibilities for new community enterprise. The aim of this document is to showcase the kind of analysis that can be conducted to determine the preliminary feasibility of siting renewable energy production on both contaminated mining sites as well as an even more viable contaminated site due to more robust solar conditions. Thus, this document provides decision makers in countries facing the reality of remediating and seeking to sustainably reuse brownfields (including mining sites) more insight into how such sites may be evaluated for their potential for renewable energy production.