Rehabilitating the mine dump through the Phyto project

Nobulawo Sitshaluza

 As a group of activists in the community of Snake Park, we started the phytoremediation project last year early around February. I saw it as a great idea to be part of this initiative. We started with a small portion of land which was 20 by 20 meters. 

When we started, we started with the tilling of the land and using cow dung to fertilize the soil, before doing our sunflower plantation. We saw that sunflowers are the best plants because their roots can be used as the extractor for chemicals in the tailing mine dump. We can also produce oil from the sunflower plant as an economic spin-off for the community.

The first challenge we have in our phytoremediation project is the nearby livestock farmers, they take their animals to go and graze on top of tailing. When we arrive, we will see the animal footprints and some of our sunflowers being eaten by these animals. We have the drip system because some days we don’t go to the tailings to fetch water for our plants every day. This system helps us with the watering of our plants. 

The other challenge we faced was that when we went to the tailing mine dump, we were very shocked to find that all of the plants and our bottles were simply being taken and thrown on the side. Our beautiful sunflowers were ripped from the soil. This was pure sabotage and we have no clue who might have done this nowadays.

We can only hope that whoever might try to sabotage our phytoremediation project may see the error of his/her ways. All we can do as activists who are involved in phytoremediation is to launch and introduce ourselves to farmers and the community at large.