Development of alluvial deposits of minerals is almost always connected with the necessity to include large volumes of surface water in the working cycle of mining enterprises. In the process of open pit mining, process water is enriched with a large amount of suspended material, the content of which in some cases reaches 15-20 g/L. A significant part of these process waters is returned to the river network. Annually within the Magadan region only from washing of metal-bearing placers 1-1,2 billion m³ of process water enters the river network. ...

In the open-pit mining of bauxite at the Tikhvin Alumina Plant, the erosion by surface and groundwater of the sandy–clayey and bauxite rocks composing the bench faces, working platforms, waste dumps, as well as the bottom and walls of drainage ditches, results in the pollution of mine waters.

In recent years, more and more attention of researchers is being attracted to the study of sedimentation waters of clayey rocks. It has been noted that as the solutions are squeezed by the application of individual load steps, mineralization in subsequent portions of the solution continuously decreases. This regularity was attempted to be explained by the action of filtration effect, influence of membrane equilibrium, the different dissolving capacity of different categories of bound water. Currently, an increasing number of researchers are inclined to the fact that the difference in mineralization of subsequent portions of the solution indicates the existence near the surface of the solid phase of some part of the solution with a reduced concentration of dissolved salts – the so called bound solution.