Assessment of groundwater and surface water quality in a typical mining community: application of water quality indices and hierarchical cluster analyses.

The rate at which freshwater sources are being contaminated by mining operations in the South-Western part of Ghana is alarming. However, no study has quantified the degree of contamination of the freshwater in such areas, leaving a gap in the literature that requires immediate attention. This study assessed the quality of the surface and groundwater in the Tarkwa Nsuaem Municipality.

Enhanced arsenic removal using lateritic bauxite modified by heating and blending.

The use of bauxite to remove arsenic from wastewater has been confirmed to be effective, but its removal efficiency in literature is not up to 90%, hence the need to devise a more effective method to remove arsenic from wastewater. In this study, a novel material was prepared by thermally modifying and blending yellow and red lateritic bauxite to form thermally modified and blended yellow and red lateritic bauxite (TYB + TRB). The adsorption isotherm, morphology and chemical composition of the novel material were determined by the Langmuir and Freundlich models, Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and X-ray Fluorescence (XRF), respectively.