Speciation and Release Kinetics Simulation of Zn and Cd from River Sediment Contaminated by Gold Mining

Heavy metals release from contaminated sediments is one of the most important chemical processes affecting overlying water quality in river, lake, and ocean. The objective of this study was to determine the leaching properties, kinetic rate, and leaching amount of zinc (Zn) and cadmium (Cd) from the river sediment contaminated by gold mining. Speciation of Zn and Cd in the sediments was extracted by a modified BCR extraction procedure. Release kinetics of Zn and Cd were studied by a simulated leaching experiment using a stirred-flow reactor and a two-site equilibrium-kinetic model. The sediments we studied were significantly contaminated by Zn (620–5878 mg kg−1) and Cd (2–67 mg kg−1), and both have high content of weak acid extractable forms. There were much more smaller particles on the surface of sediment JH01 and JH02 than sediment JH03 and JH04. The two-site equilibrium-kinetic model fits the release data of Zn and Cd well, and it was demonstrated as an effective tool to describe the kinetic release of Zn and Cd from river sediments. Kinetic rates obtained from curve fitting showed large variation among sediments indicating different reaction mechanisms. The rapid release stage (before the second stop-flow) of Zn and Cd was controlled both by the equilibrium sites and the kinetic sites, while the slow release stage (after the second stop-flow) was mainly controlled by the kinetic sites. The total leaching amount of Zn and Cd in JH01 (27.1 mg kg−1, 0.4 mg kg−1), JH02 (474 mg kg−1, 7.5 mg kg−1), JH03 (320 mg kg−1, 7.6 mg kg−1), and JH04 (52.4 mg kg−1, 2.0 mg kg−1) demonstrated that large amount of Zn and Cd in sediments can be leached into solution. Thus, effective measures should be taken to prevent leaching of heavy metals from river sediment.