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On a follow up insert on Carte Blanche on Sunday the 6th of March 2011, some possible solutions were shown to viewers of how to clean up the Acid Mine Drainage Problem plagueing South Africa. 'The water problem, the mine effluent problem is not a water problem it 's a salt problem. All of the technologies can manage - or many of them can produce clean water. What differentiates us is that we can usefully employ the salts and that is critical. ' - Richard Doyle (Managing Director: Earth) Of the 3 solutions shown, one of them by a company called Earth looks to be the most promising. Richard Doyle 's start-up company is turning the salts into fertiliser and explosives and attracting a lot of interest from overseas. What 's best about his solutions thus far is that it creates it 's own income and will not cost the taxpayer the money (we hope) to fix the AMD problem. So far the Minister of Finance, Pravin Gordhan has set aside R225 Million of taxpayers money to deal with the Acid Mine Drainage Problem but it should not be the taxpayer who fits the bill for fixing this serious issue. We remain firm that the Mining Companies who created the problem and made Billions or Trillions of Dollars from South African soil are the one 's who must be made to pay the bill for the cleanup and perhaps the solution above is one way forward. Now that the AMD issue is out in the open we have the usual rigmaroll of politicians wasting time talking and not doing. Even the taxpayers money set aside thus far will seemingly only show something concrete in a year 's time and the money set aside is nowhere near enough to even scratch the surface. Time is ticking and the mine drainage continues to flow down our rivers, streams and into our groundwater. We have decades worth of environmental damage that has been caused by the gold mining industry, the cleanup is going to take many many years. In some cases there are areas where cleanup is not even possible due to radioactivity issues from Uranium that has been seeping out of mines for years. We have many mining companies still trying to procure mining rights in South Africa and even a State owned mining company that was recently announced. So we have not learned to clean up one problem and we have a barrage of new companies who will quite possibly do the same. So what can you do for yourself? Many companies selling water solutions to homeowners have sprung up in recent times offering citizens solutions to purify their water or harvest it from rain etc. For now, given the speediness that the politicians deal with things, this might be the best or only solution for the average joe namely to make sure that he at least has access to fresh untainted water for he and his family. Whatever you do, make sure you shop around when looking for a water purification system, there 's lots on the market, some good some not so good. Also make sure to have your water tested properly so that you know what you are dealing with. You simply cannot trust the water that 's coming out of your tap and it may be a very long time before we see an end to the AMD issue in South Africa.