Narrator: After a coal mine shuts down,
the pollution doesn't stop.
Toxic waste flows for decades,
contaminating rivers and killing aquatic life.
And it's nearly impossible to contain.
John: Yep.
Michelle: For a long time, most of these streams
were just written off.
Narrator: Now, a team has developed a method
to harvest the muck
and turn it into paint.
But can it really clean up a century of worldwide waste?
It's harvest day at Pine Run, a creek in Ohio.
Yeah, keep going.
Worker: It’s moving now.
John: Yeah, I see the flow.
Narrator: Michelle Shively MacIver and John Sabraw
have been making pigment out of this pollution
for over a decade.
Michelle: This stuff is just really good.
Yeah, it's our favorite.
Michelle: It is our favorite.
Narrator: Their team built a system
of pipes that collect smelly goo called acid mine drainage,
or AMD for short.
[retching noise followed by laughter]
It's highly acidic water leaking
from an old coal mine that closed over 100 years ago.
When you leave a mine, and you just walk away from it,
what happens is, is it fills up instantly with water.
There really is no way to seal the mines completely.
Narrator: The water that still leaks
from mines today creates iron oxide,
which can be lethal to aquatic life.
John: That pipe is full of iron sludge,
and it's gonna come out of there really fast.
Narrator: But it also happens
to be an essential ingredient to make paint.
Buckets.
We need buckets.
Michelle: It's a low-tech system right now. [Laughs]
Narrator: That's what this team is harvesting today.
John: It's gold, Matt; it's gold.
Narrator: The team filters buckets
of iron oxide using these troughs.
Michelle: Smooth it out and put some Cool Whip on there,
and it's like pumpkin pie in a bin.
I'd eat it.
Narrator: Today's haul is over 200 pounds of iron oxide.
It's a bit more than this mine site pumps out
in a single day.
Wow.
Narrator: Then they move it
to their research facility,
where engineers wash the pigment to remove impurities
that affect the final color.
Guy: Basically, we're just diluting out
all the dissolved solids.
Narrator: This is Guy Riefler.
He's an engineer who partnered
with Michelle and John to start True Pigments.
Guy: It still kind of shocks me
that Sunday Creek is this orange mess.
And it goes right through several communities,
and it's been doing it for 20 years.
And aside from us, nobody's really doing anything about it.
Narrator: The team dries the pigment
before shipping it off to a giant kiln.
They change the color by controlling the temperature.
Then they send the pigment to Portland, Oregon,
where Gamblin Artists Colors uses it to make paint.
Pete: We wanted to be the first to make color with it.
We were just kind of all in.
There's three colors that are all made from pigment
that has been painstakingly reclaimed by John and team.
Narrator: This one is called Iron Violet.
This worker mixes the pigment, zinc, and flax oil.
And a mill uses heat
and pressure to combine the pigment and oil.
Worker: And so with a little bit of pressure,
we draw it down.
Narrator: Then workers test for thickness,
texture, and color.
Finally, they bottle it up.
Gamblin markets the paint as reclaimed earth colors.
John teaches art and uses the paints in his own studio.
John: If I want something deep and red and earthy,
you're not gonna get anything better than iron oxide.
Narrator: He says his art
helps to start conversations
about protecting the environment.
John: The circle gives them
permission to decide
for themselves instantly
whether that is a universe,
a planet, a stream, or microbes.
Narrator: And the new colors are taking off.
Painters across the country have shared
what they've created using the hashtag
#reclaimedcolor.
For now, True Pigments can't harvest enough iron oxide
to clean up an entire stream.
Michelle: It has such a satisfying plop.
Narrator: But the company plans to scale up.
By 2024, True Pigments plans to open a larger facility.
It will harvest iron oxide and clean the water
at one of Ohio's most polluted acid mine sites.
That would mean the company could harvest raw material
that could be used
in all kinds of products, not just paints.
Michelle: Construction materials, concrete,
bricks, it's used for a lot of industrial coatings,
agricultural fertilizer, cosmetics.
We really had to find something useful
to make out of this really detrimental pollution.
Narrator: And Michelle says her team's method
of retrieving iron oxide is more sustainable than mining it.
Unfortunately, they're dealing
with a nearly unlimited resource.
There are nearly 10,000 square miles
of abandoned coal mines across the United States.
Iron oxide didn't do anything wrong.
Iron oxide is not to blame here.
And if you treat it right, like we're doing,
it is a valuable asset.
It is beautiful.
These mines will continue producing AMD
for hundreds of years.
Narrator: But Michelle is confident
that turning pollution into art can make a difference.