Business News
Milestone for Alcoa rehabilitation
Tuesday 01. September 2009 - Alcoa of Australia has again demonstrated why its a world leader in mine site rehabilitation, after growing its one millionth plant in a state-of-the-art laboratory.
Manager of Mines, Bill Knight, said mine site rehabilitation was a complex and scientific process and some plant species, which need to be returned to the land during rehabilitation, needed a helping hand.
“There are several ways plants can be returned to rehabilitation, but some plant species do not produce viable seed, or if they do it is difficult to collect, and some dont readily germinate – these are what we call recalcitrant species and they need to be grown in a nursery in a process called tissue culture”.
Alcoas Marrinup Nursery near Dwellingup, south of Perth, includes a tissue culture laboratory which has been successful in restoring a high diversity of plant species for mine site rehabilitation – no other mining company in the world has comparable facilities.
“Tissue culture is essentially growing plant shoots in a sterile, controlled, environment usually in sealed jars. The plant shoots are grown on media which contains nutrients for plant growth; minerals, amino acids, vitamins, hormones, sugar and water – all set in a jelly called agar,” Mr Knight said.
“Every four weeks the plant material is divided and placed into fresh agar and within a few months thousands of plants can be produced.”
Mining Environmental Research Manger, Dr. Ian Colquhoun, said:
“Tissue culture requires a lot of patience, perseverance and hard work, and this one million milestone is a credit to our scientists and nursery staff at Marrinup.”
Alcoa was the first mining company in the world to achieve 100 per cent plant species richness in our rehabilitated mine site areas in Western Australia. The companys rehabilitation objective is to re-establish a functional ecosystem that will fulfil the pre-mining forest land uses including conservation, timber production, water catchment and recreation.
Since 1994, the one million tissue cultured plants have gone into over 6,537 hectares of mine rehabilitation at Alcoas Huntly Mine near Dwellingup and the Willowdale Mine near Wagerup.