Most consumers don’t know where the gold in their products comes from, or how it is mined. Gold mining is one of the most destructive industries in the world. It can displace communities, contaminate drinking water, hurt workers, and destroy pristine environments. It pollutes water and land with mercury and cyanide, endangering the health of people and ecosystems. Producing gold for one wedding ring alone generates 20 tons of waste.
Poisoned Waters
Gold mining can have devastating effects on nearby water resources. Toxic mine waste contains as many as three dozen dangerous chemicals including:
- arsenic
- lead
- mercury
- petroleum byproducts
- acids
- cyanide
Mining companies around the world routinely dump toxic waste into rivers, lakes, streams and oceans – our research has shown 180 million tonnes of such waste annually. But even if they do not, such toxins often contaminate waterways when infrastructure such as tailings dams, which holds mine waste, fail.
According to the UNEP there have been over 221 major tailings dam failures. These have killed hundreds of people around the world, displaced thousands and contaminated the drinking water of millions.
The resulting contaminated water is called acid mine drainage, a toxic cocktail uniquely destructive to aquatic life. According to one study: “The effects of AMD are so multifarious that community structure collapses rapidly and totally, even though very often no single pollutant on its own would have caused such a severe ecological impact.”
These same “multifarious impacts” also makes recovery from such wastes much more difficult.
This environmental damage ultimately affects us — in addition to drinking water contamination, AMD’s byproducts such as mercury and heavy metals work their way into the food chain and sicken people and animals for generations.
Solid Waste
Digging up ore displaces huge piles of earth and rock. Processing the ore to produce metals generates immense quantities of additional waste, as the amount of recoverable metal is a small fraction of the total ore mass. In fact, the manufacture of an average gold ring generates more than 20 tons of waste.
Many gold mines employ a process known as heap leaching, which includes dripping a cyanide solution through huge piles of ore. The solution strips away the gold and is collected in a pond, then run through an electro-chemical process to extract the gold. This method of producing gold is cost effective but enormously wasteful: 99.99 percent of the heap becomes waste. Gold mining areas are frequently studded with these immense, toxic piles. Some reach heights of 100 meters (over 300 feet), nearly the height of a 30-story building, and can take over entire mountainsides. To cut costs, the heaps are often abandoned. Contaminated water, containing cyanide and other dangerous chemicals, can often contaminate groundwater.
Metal Mining was the number one toxic polluter in the United States in 2010. It is responsible for 1.5 billion pounds of chemical waste annualy- more than forty percent of all reported toxic releases. Find who releases what in your part of the country by exploring the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2010 Toxic Release Inventory, or the web-based public-art project Superfund365.
Threatened Natural Areas
The mining industry has a long record of threatening natural areas, including officially protected areas. Nearly three-quarters of active mines and exploration sites overlap with regions defined as of high conservation value. Mining is a major threat to biodiversity and to “frontier forest” (large tracts of relatively undisturbed forest).
Source: https://earthworks.org/