Post Mining Land Reclamation With Bamboo

Bamboo is a tree that is easy to grow, tall quickly and has many benefits. One of them is the use of bamboo trees for post-mining land reclamation. Damaged and barren post-mining land is indeed not easy to plant directly. Certain treatments or efforts are needed so that the land can be planted with certain plants. When the land has become fertile soil, of course almost all plants can be planted on the land. And to achieve these conditions it takes time and a process that is not short.

Soil improvement efforts in the sense of improving soil fertility are the first thing to do so that plants can grow well on the land. Plants that can be planted at this stage are also only certain types of plants such as pioneer plants in the form of fast growing plants such as legumes. And bamboo as a group of grass plants is also easy to plant and grow on marginal lands such as post-mining land. Availability of water, adequate nutrients, pH or adequate soil acidity are some of the things needed to achieve optimal growth.

As an illustration, sand is a bad planting medium because there are almost no nutrients in it and this is almost the same as the condition of post-mining land in general. Substances or organic materials need to be added so that they become fertilizers or nutrients for the land. Animal dung is the best organic material for this, so integration with livestock is the best concept for post-mining land reclamation. Biochar with its various advantages also needs to be added to the land. Biochar can be produced from biomass wastes from plantations, agriculture and forestry for this purpose. The use of biochar on a wide scale can also provide income in the form of carbon credits because biochar is applied to the soil as a carbon sink with carbon sequestration.

Bamboo trees as a type of grass plant have fibrous roots. Large bamboo clumps have a large network of fibrous roots as well. The success of bamboo roots is one of the keys to bamboo growth. The use of biochar in bamboo nurseries will also improve the roots of the bamboo seedlings produced. While in bamboo plantations, the use of biochar also has many benefits, especially on post-mining land the results will look more real, such as maintaining moisture, more available nutrients, not acidic soil pH and so on. Biochar is useful for improving soil fertility, so it can be used in nurseries and plantations.

Currently a number of mining companies have carried out land reclamation with these trees, but most of them are still testing and do not yet have a comprehensive concept. Post-mining land reclamation with bamboo in Indonesia is estimated to start in 2010 or has been going on for about 12 years until now. A number of bamboo species have also been identified as suitable for the post-mining area. Scale up or capacity enlargement is an important and current challenge, especially when it is supported by information on 12 years of reclamation with these bamboo trees. With this capacity expansion, besides bamboo production, commercial production can also be achieved, the application of biochar will also find its optimum benefits, namely improving soil fertility and carbon sinks (carbon sequenstration).

The use of bamboo in particular is an aspect that has not received serious attention in these reclamation projects. Whereas only with the use of bamboo which is a plantation product can the reclamation effort be known to provide economic benefits or not. The lack of serious attention to the use of bamboo is thought to be because the bamboo reclamation is still in the experimental stage with a small area. But if it has been pursued professionally, the economic aspect will become an important concern.

The use of bamboo, for example, is to make people's houses around the mine. With bamboo treated first and also using the art of building architecture, the bamboo house produced will be of high quality, in the sense of being sturdy and beautiful and far from being cheap. This will reduce the use of certain wood for houses, some of which have limited types, such as ironwood in Kalimantan. Indeed, there are many ways to use the bamboo, but it is necessary to choose the best one based on the related conditions and situations. Ruminant farming, especially for the production of organic matter or land fertilizers, will also require cages or in rotational grazing, poles for paddock will also be required. The cages and poles can also be made with these bamboo products.

And when bamboo production is used for biomass production and then used for biochar production, it is also technically possible. But economically, it is necessary to study whether it also provides benefits, both from the effect of improving soil fertility and carbon credit. In this case, the most important thing is the production of the biomass itself so that the bamboo species that produce the most biomass are selected. The more soils that can be repaired with biochar treatment, the more land that can be recovered so that it becomes productive land. When the soil is fertile again, various food crops are also very possible to be planted on the land. The increasing population also demands more food needs, so food production needs to be increased, including the use of these recoverable lands.

Biochar and Land Reclamation of Ex-Coal Mines

Reclamation of ex-coal mining land is the obligation of the mining company, but often this is not done properly for various reasons. These are mainly due to weak rule enforcement and light sanctions. With the area of ex-coal mines that has reached millions of hectares and the reclamation efforts are needed, but the realization in the field is still very minimal, making environmental damage even greater. The thing that can encourage efforts to improve the ex-coal mining land is the profit or economic factor that can be obtained. This means that if the reclamation effort also bring economic benefits - in addition to environmental benefits, of course - then the coal companies will also be happy to do so. So what activity is it?

The photo is taken from here

After the coal deposit is taken, the top soil should be returned to the land. The basic thing that needs to be done is to improve the quality of the soil so that it can be used for planting various crops. By improving soil quality, besides soil fertility can be restored and even increased, it also includes isolating (immobilizing) a number of harmful elements from the ex-coal mining land. Creating a profitable and sustainable business activity is the next step. The improved soil can then be planted and legumes are the best choice, this is because legumes are other than pioneer plant types with high survivability, strong and deep roots that prevent erosion, root nodules from azetobacter symbiosis by binding nitrogen from the atmosphere which fertilizes the soil also provides many other benefits. Ruminant husbandry is a profitable and sustainable business activity, because it mainly utilizes the leaves of the legume plant as a source of feed. The livestock manure can also be used to further improve the health and quality of the soil so that soil fertility continues to increase and is maintained. The wood from the legume plantation can also be used for productions namely briquettes, charcoal briquettes and even wood pellets.

As a basic thing and the entry point for the above business is improving the quality of the land or soil of the ex-coal mines. There are a number of ways to do this, but the use of biochar is one of the best options. With biochar not only increases the pH or acidity of the soil so that many nutrients will be absorbed by plants better and soil microbial activity to decompose organic matter is more active, but it is also able to absorb a number of harmful chemical elements in the soil, increasing soil organic carbon that can last hundreds of years and also absorbs the greenhouse gase from atmosphere. The biochar can be made from a number of agricultural, forestry and agro-industrial wastes, such as wood chips from logging or from palm oil mill waste such as empty fruit bunches and fiber. A number of areas in Kalimantan are not only rich in coal deposits and also currently many of these ex-coal mining lands are abandoned, as well as a lot of biomass materials such as forest waste and palm oil mill waste for the production of biochar.

In order to reduce CO2 emissions in the atmosphere, biochar is also able to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere (carbon sequestration) and is a carbon negative scenario. The biochar applied to the soil is a carbon sink, as an option for carbon credit other than carbon offset. In the current era of decarbonization, efforts to reduce CO2 level in the atmosphere are important. In Indonesia, where there is still a lot of forest land, carbon credit can be obtained from the absorption of CO2 by the trees in the forest, so that the forest acts as a carbon sink as well. But in other countries where the use of fossil energy is very large or massive, they must reduce the adverse climate impacts caused by burning fossil energy materials, especially coal. They can buy carbon credits on this biochar application.

 

Coal is the most widely used fossil energy for power generation in the world today and Indonesia is one of the producers of such coal. Although in the near future the use of coal will be reduced and in some countries it will be stopped altogether, but the negative impacts of coal mining are still many, damaging and even endangering the environment. This is an urgency to improve the land or ex-coal mining land which is estimated to reach 8 million hectares in Indonesia. On the one hand, coal power plants can buy carbon credits for biochar applications like the scheme above. Palm oil mills on the other hand also produce a lot of solid waste, especially empty fruit bunches (EFB) that can be used for the production of biochar. These big companies could collaborate to solve climate problems due to the increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. To this day, it is reported from the Mauna loa observatory, in Hawaii, United States that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has exceeded 400 ppm or there is still an increase of about 2 ppm every year, even though the global target is to decrease the concentration to only 350 ppm.