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Bozhi Ren [1] and Yingying Zhou [1] and Andrew S. Hursthouse [1; 2] and Renjian Deng [1]

Academic Editor: Miguel de la Guardia

1, Hunan Provincial Key Laboratory of Shale Gas Resource Exploitation, Hunan University of Science and Technology, Xiangtan 411201, China, hnust.edu.cn

2, School of Science & Sport, University of the West of Scotland, Paisley PA1 2BE, UK, uws.ac.uk

Received Nov 19, 2016; Revised Feb 4, 2017; Accepted Feb 5, 2017

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

1. Introduction

Antimony (Sb) is a typical toxic and harmful heavy metal element; the United Nations health organization stipulates that the body’s daily intake of antimony in water should be less than 0.86 mg/kg [1, 2]. However, with the exploitation and utilization of antimony ore resources, a large amount of antimony slag is produced from antimony smelting and perennially exposed on the surface in a number of regions in China. Under the continuous action of rain, the process of desorption and mass transfer results in the introduction of antimony from the solid waste into mining area and its surrounding water environment, creating regional water environment pollution problems with great risk to human health [3–6]. Recent studies have concentrated on the release of heavy metal elements in soil, sludge, dust, and other solid media and the influence of a range of factors on waste leaching patterns [5, 7–14]. However, few reports exist on the release characteristics and cumulative leaching mechanisms of antimony in smelting slag stacking area under sustained rainfall. This study, therefore, evaluated a release test on antimony smelting waste slag with simulated rainfall. Guo et al. [5] comprehensively investigated the physical and chemical characteristics of the leaching of the solid wastes as from some core metal production areas. The more hazardous materials were identified. Hu et al. [15] studied the leaching characteristics and changes in the leached layer of antimony-bearing ores from China. The sources of release of some hazardous elements such as Sb, As, Pb, and Cr from typical antimony ores were determined. More and more studies [16–18] have been undertaken to provide better understanding of behavior of metallic elements in ore...
 

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