The impact to water resources is a critical issue in mining. The exploitation of a mine can influence surface water systems, like rivers, lakes, swamps, and groundwater systems, like aquifers, seriously. The impact concerns and the pumping of water out of the mining area, relocation of water bodies, changes in water quality, and the creation of new water bodies and hydraulic systems in the environment in and around the mining area. The since 1990 lasting mine closure activities of coal, uranium, salt and other mines in Germany shows the dimension of the impact, and the long term character of establishing a new, selfregulating surface and groundwater system with a stable volume and quality of water. Because of the presence of sulfidic minerals like pyrite and marcasite in the overburden and in the coal of lignite mines, the well-known phenomena of Acid Mine Water Drainage (AMD) becomes an important issue in public awareness and in permission processes. The Frame Water Regulation of European Union not more allow an impact to the water systems in the future. For running projects measures must developed to decrease or avoid the impact to water systems. The article deals with a new developed and successful applied method, how to reduce the impact to the water quality by AMD. The solution was founding by balancing of potential acid and buffer geological material in the overburden and interburden, and their selective mining and dumping by a zero AMD strategy. The strategy has the target, that potential acid and buffer materials are been dumped in layers on each other, so that the acid production is immediately buffed by the soils around. The second part is, to avoid and reduce the oxygen access to the sulfidic soils, e.g. by covering the working levels with neutral soil and seed of grass, immediately behind the excavators and spreaders. The precondition was the establishment of a quality model of the hydrogeochemical behavior of the over- and interburden formations by using the drill hole data. In a second step an accurate mine planning and operation system was introduced. The monitoring shows, that since introducing the new technology, no acid mine water runs out of the dumps. Significant is, that the introduction of the new approach of planning and operation of the waste material in the mining company not requires technical changes or additional resources. A side effect is that with the reduction of AMD, possible production of CO2 in the dumps by interaction of acid and carbonates reduced. This is relevant for the dump stability and the ecology of the mining project.
