In Southern Ohio, when a child is asked to draw a stream, instead of choosing a blue crayon, some might reach for the orange. That’s because pollution from miles of improperly sealed old coal mines have turned the waterways in their communities orange for almost fifty years. Two Ohio University professors have created an unlikely alliance that combines the arts and engineering to tackle this environmental problem.
Ohio University Art Professor John Sabraw remembered the first time he encountered acid mine drainage during a field trip with other university faculty members.
“I had never seen an orange stream before. I grew up in Idaho and other places where the water was clear,” he recalled. “To walk up to these streams—and you smell them first, right? Oh, it’s sulfur—it’s basically Hades! You’re like what is that smell? And then you walk across the streams and they are absolutely orange. Not brown, not muddy, straight up orange.”
This technicolor pollution from the area’s mining legacy plagues many of the waterways in Southern Ohio.
“And they tell me it’s iron oxide,” Sabraw said is sitting in his painting studio on campus. Along the walls were brightly colored paintings reminiscent of fantastical images you might see on a slide under a microscope. “I’m like ok, half the paints in this room are iron oxides. The earliest cave paintings that we’ve ever discovered were made with iron oxide. This is our pigment. This is the human pigment, right?”
I was like, “can I make paint out of it?”
They're like, “we don’t know.”
I was like, “I don’t know either.”
“So I took a jar of iron oxide sludge from the acid mine drainage polluted streams back to my studio, and I was like, I’m going to make paint out of this thing and I’m going to tell people about it,” Sabraw said enthusiastically. But he wasn’t able to turn the collected pollution into a viable paint medium. “It was awful,” he said laughing. “So it was like wow, I guess this wasn’t a good idea, or maybe I just don’t have the skills.”
Around that same time, Sabraw had a serendipitous encounter with a parent at one of his daughter’s soccer games. She said she was studying with another O.U. professor and they needed an artist's help. Sabraw agreed to meet him for coffee.
On the other side of campus Guy Riefler opened the door to his lab in the engineering department. Riefler is the Chair of Civil Engineering at Ohio University.
“I’m an Environmental Engineer and I started down this path because I just wanted to clean up pollution—I wanted to clean up the environment,” Riefler said standing crates, and buckets of tools stained orange from iron oxide pollution. “And when I moved here to Southeast Ohio, here at Ohio University, I was struck by the polluted streams from the legacy of the coal industry. It’s ugly. We have these orange streams around here that can no longer be used as a resource by the community. They destroy the wildlife, they destroy the habitat.”
In the 1970’s the Surface Mining and Reclamation Act helped to establish and enforce environmental controls in today’s mining industry. Reifler said “the problems are these old coal mines which pre-date the law and they weren’t grandfathered in. Those coal companies walked away and it became the problem of the communities and the state to clean it up.”
It's a pollution problem that’s too expensive for the state to fully manage.
Riefler was recently awarded a patent for developing a process to collect that drainage pollution and convert it into a pigment for paint. “My whole focus here was to clean up the stream,” Reifler said looking at the stained lab equipment. “So you have a lot of water that comes out of the mine - and it’s a lot of water - it’s over a million gallons a day of polluted water that flows out of that mine. And it’s got 250 milligrams per liter of iron in it—It’s like every day you throw two cars into that stream, that’s the quantity of iron that’s going in there right now as we speak.”
Riefler’s process separates that iron pollution from the water. He’s teamed up with the local non-profit agency Rural Action to build one water treatment plant in Truetown, Ohio which will clean up probably the worst seep in the State in Sunday Creek. “That’s one pollution source that is killing seven miles of one creek,” Riefler said.
After the clean water is separated and returned to the stream, the pollution is left in the bottom of the tanks. Reifler held up a glass jar of what looked like wet clay. “Now we’ve got all this iron sludge. Which works out to about 6,000 pounds a day of dried pigment that we can harvest,” he said. This is where John Sabraw’s artistic experience comes into play—by helping Riefler refine the process of turning the iron sludge into usable pigments for paint.
So far, Riefler and Sabraw have developed 3 shades of pigment in ocher, red, and violet—which are being sold through a paint company called Gamblin in a limited edition of artists oil paints called Reclaimed Earth Colors. Holding up a test tube of dusky violet-colored powder, Reifler said, “This is something that has been killing the stream and now we can harvest it as a resource, and the objective here is to clean up the stream for free.”
Reifler said that “geologists have looked at this site and they expect this is going to be polluted for the next 200 years, so we’re going to operate this plant for a long time.”
That will lead to not only cleaner streams, but a steady source of employment for a historically impoverished area.
