An artist, an engineer, and a paint company are working
together to repair acid mine damage in southeast Ohio.
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Photo of acid mine runoff at Truetown by John Sabraw.
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Environmentally-ethical choices can be very difficult for
the artist. The toxicity of paint rests not in its binders, but in its
pigments. Copper, cobalt, cadmium,
and lead are the worst. It’s impossible to avoid them completely, but the
danger isn’t really to you, it’s to the poor schmoe who has to mine or make
them. Most pigments are no longer milled in the US, even when your paint is
made here. It’s one of the hidden costs of globalization—we’re better at not
polluting America because we just do it elsewhere.
Despite our better environmental record of late, we have
some dreadful pollution pits remaining in America. Southeastern Ohio has a long
history of coal mining, and it’s unfortunately still visible today, in iron-rich,
contaminated runoff from abandoned mines. These coal mines contain the
mineral pyrite, which reacts with water and air to form sulfuric acid and iron.
This makes the water highly acidic and orange. Of course, this waste doesn’t
just stay in downstream creeks and rivers, smothering plant life and animals.
It contaminates drinking water as well.
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Iron hydroxide precipitate in a Missouri stream receiving
acid drainage from surface coal mining, photo courtesy D. Hardesty, USGS
Columbia Environmental Research Center.
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Lower-volume acidic runoff is remediated with a limestone
leach bed. Metals are separated and trapped in the bed, and clean water returns
to the stream. But there are some sites that are just too massive for this; some
release 800 to 1,000 gallons of contaminated water per minute, according
to Sunday Creek watershed coordinator Michelle Shively.
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From Chroma,
by John Sabraw, photo courtesy of the artist.
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Enter two professors from Ohio University: Guy Reifler, civil engineering
professor, and John Sabraw,
art professor. Instead of trapping and disposing of the iron oxide, they thought,
why not dry it and make paint pigment out of it? In 2018, they created a Kickstarter
campaign to fund a test program. It raised $33,138. Now they’re proposing to
build a full-scale plant that would treat the entire million-gallon-a-day acid
runoff from the mine at Truetown in Athens County, Ohio.
It makes perfect sense to reclaim iron oxide that’s been
left around by miners; iron oxide was the first pigment; it’s lightfast, safe, cheap
and plentiful.
But to process that much water presupposes a market for 5000
pounds of iron-oxide pigment a day. The initial pigment experiments were done
by Professor Sabraw; the professors then approached paint-maker Gamblin. It was a good choice;
Gamblin has a lengthy interest in environmental sustainability. Among other
things, each year they take the pigment powder trapped by the factory’s air
cleaner and makes a special batch of paint called Torrit Grey, which they distribute
free to their customers.
Gamblin took some of Truetown’s pigment and created three
colors with it. They’re shortly going to introduce these in a kit called the Reclaimed
Earth Colors set, which will retail at $39.99. They will donate 20% of these
revenues back to the Truetown project.
Unfortunately, acid water doesn’t just leach iron out of old
mines; it can also bring manganese, cadmium, zinc, copper, arsenic and aluminum
along with it. I did wonder how well these less-salubrious minerals have been
sorted out of the new pigment. And then I stopped and asked myself whether any mined
pigment is pure. Probably not.
It’s a good idea, and one I’m happy to support. However, while
Carol Jaeger at Salt Bay Art Supply
in Damariscotta is the source of this information, I haven’t seen these paints on
any shelves yet. As soon as they are, I hope they sell.
