How to Approach the Undermining of Surface Structures With Emphasis on Wetlands

Sets out good practice for planning, implementing, monitoring and adaptively managing land rehabilitation at surface coal mines, with generic rehabilitation objectives, implementation actions and suggested relinquishment criteria for each component. It updates guidance first issued in 1981 and revised in 2007, reflecting later changes to South African rehabilitation legislation.

A single float sink test destroys the sample and gives one deterministic answer, so it cannot show how washability changes with particle size distribution. Simulating washability from petrographic images and tomography allows many size distributions to be tested statistically from one sample. Running simulation alongside float sink work during exploration lets the prediction error of each be compared.

Sets out the steps to establish a small scale coal mine in South Africa, from mineral rights and regulatory approvals through finance, mining and processing choices, marketing, and environmental management and closure. The information a new entrant needs sits in many separate places, so the guideline draws it together from practitioners rather than from any single published source.