Spoil tip
pile built of accumulated spoil
A spoil tip (also called a boney pile, culm bank, gob pile, waste tip or bing) is a pile built of accumulated spoil – waste material removed during mining. Spoil tips are not formed of slag, but in some areas, such as England and Wales, they are referred to as slag heaps and sometimes as pit heaps. In Scotland the word bing is used. In North American English the term is mine dump or mine waste dump.
The term "spoil" is also used to refer to material removed when digging a foundation, tunnel, or other large excavation. Such material may be ordinary soil and rocks (after separation of coal from waste), or may be heavily contaminated with chemical waste, determining how it may be disposed of. Clean spoil may be used for land reclamation.
Spoil is distinct from tailings, which is the processed material that remains after the valuable components have been extracted from ore.
Etymology
The phrase originates from the French word espoilelier, a verb conveying the meaning "to seize by violence, to plunder, to take by force".
Physical description
Spoil tips may be conical in shape, and can appear as conspicuous features of the landscape, or they may be much flatter and eroded, especially if vegetation has established itself.
The public source identifies “Spoil tip” as pile built of accumulated spoil. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Spoil, pile and built.
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This entry incorporates text from “Spoil tip” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.