"what do you do when that once pristine water is polluted with wastewater from abandoned copper mines?"
“A promising solution relies on materials that capture heavy metal atoms, such as copper ions, from wastewater through a separation process called adsorption. But commercially available copper-ion-capture products still lack the chemical specificity and load capacity to precisely separate heavy metals from water.
Now, a team of scientists led by the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has designed a new material—called ZIOS (zinc imidazole salicylaldoxime)—that targets and traps copper ions from wastewater with unprecedented precision and speed. In a paper recently published in the journal Nature Communications, the scientists say that ZIOS offers the water industry and the research community the first blueprint for a water-remediation technology that scavenges specific heavy metal ions with a measure of control at the atomic level that far surpasses the current state of the art.
"ZIOS has a high adsorption capacity and the fastest copper adsorption kinetics of any material known so far—all in one," said senior author Jeff Urban , who directs the Inorganic Nanostructures Facility in Berkeley Lab's Molecular Foundry.”
https://phys.org/news/2020-11-material-copper-toxic-wastewater.html
Could be important locally. We have a lake full of the stuff.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Weed+Heights,+NV+89447 b.