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Geotechnical News • June 2014
33
WASTE GEOTECHNICS
UQAT-Polytechnique establishes a unique
Research Institute on Mines and the Environment
Vivian Giang
Necessity is the mother of inven-
tion. In the early 1990s, Dr. Michel
Aubertin saw a need for improving
how the mining industry dealt with its
tailings and waste rock to better pro-
tect the environment as well as a need
to train specialists with an understand-
ing of hard rock mine waste manage-
ment and site reclamation. Since then,
he has dedicated 25 years of his career
to developing new tools and tech-
niques to advance mine waste geo-
technique as it is practiced in Canada
and internationally while training the
next generation of mine waste man-
agement and reclamation engineers
and geoscientists for industry and
academia. Most recently, Aubertin and
his long-time collaborator Dr. Bruno
Bussière spearheaded the creation of
the Research Institute on Mines and
the Environment (RIME) UQAT-
Polytechnique, a unique research
organization in Quebec that focuses
on the hydrogeological, geotechni-
cal and geochemical aspects of mine
waste management and on developing
new technologies to better design and
reclaim mine waste disposal areas.
Aubertin, Professor in the Depart-
ment of Civil, Geological and Mining
Engineering at École Polytechnique de
Montréal, surprisingly was never for-
mally trained in mine waste manage-
ment and reclamation. “I completed
my MSc in soil mechanics and PhD in
rock mechanics, and I was quite active
in these fields. However, environ-
mental engineering became the order
of the day about 25 years ago – there
was a great need for engineers who
could work on mine wastes disposal
and site reclamation, and there was
no graduate program at the time for
training specialists to deal with such
issues,” says Aubertin. There were
also significant problems to be solved,
particularly for old (and sometimes
abandoned) mine sites.
Though there were some oil sands
and mine tailings research programs
developing across the country (mainly
in the west), there were no comparable
mine wastes research programs in
the province of Québec. So, Aubertin
dove into numerous textbooks, confer-
ence proceedings and journal papers
on a broad range of subjects within
geotechnical and geoenvironmental
engineering to become well versed
in the knowledge he would need to
develop a mine tailings research pro-
gram at École Polytechnique. With the
help of colleague Dr. Robert Chapuis,
Aubertin began developing the first
French-language undergraduate and
graduate courses on mine waste
management in Canada to train young
engineers in, what was then, the new-
est area of mining and civil engineer-
ing.
At the same time, Aubertin was inter-
acting with mining companies through
the Canadian Mine Environment
Neutral Drainage (MEND) Program,
and he developed innovative research
projects involving the hydrogeotechni-
cal and hydrogeochemical behaviour
of mine wastes, particularly those
that are reactive and prone to gener-
ate acid mine drainage (AMD) and
the reclamation of waste disposal
sites. Between 1989 to 2001, several
companies and the Québec Ministry
of Natural Resources supported his
research on mining geotechnics and
hydrogeology, including constitu-
Waste rock inclusion constructed in the tailings impoundment at the Cana-
dian Malartic mine. Such inclusions act as drainage and reinforcement
elements to improve the hydro-geotechnical behaviour of the impoundment
(photo provided by Osisko).