Question: How do you restore coal mines?

Paul Newell Price answered on 21 Jun 2018:

I’ve only been involved in restoring open cast coal mines; that’s where the coal is near the surface in parts of Co Durham and Northumberland (far North East England) and is dug out in strips from the surface. I haven’t been involved with restoring deep coal mines where you need a shaft to get down to the coal seam, as in Yorkshire and north Nottinghamshire (East Midlands).

To restore open cast coal mines back to agriculture (i.e. food producing land) you need to clean up the pollution (lots of different methods for this), then use bulldozers and dumper trucks to create the landform (the shape of the land that you want), then use dumper trucks and excavators with big scraper buckets to place geological deposits (broken down rock), dug from depth, to create a subsoil and topsoil. You then have to add organic matter (compost or paper crumble for example) to create your topsoil. Soil is not soil without organic matter. We tend to use agricultural muck or lime spreaders to do this. After a few months you’l have land that you can grow crops on and in some cases we can make the land better quality than it was before, growing a wider variety of crops.