Earthworks: #Environmental Impacts of #GoldMining
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.
The Biggest Polluters:
The top four mines that dump tailings into bodies of water account for 86% of the 180 million tonnes dumped into bodies of water each year. Those mines are:
Freeport McMoRan and #RioTinto’s Grasberg mine in #WestPapua, #Indonesia, which accounts for approximately 80 million tonnes of tailings
Newmont Sumitomo Mining’s Batu Hijau mine in #Indonesia, which accounts for approximately 40 million tonnes
Ok Tedi Mining Ltd.’s Ok Tedi mine in Papua New Guinea, which accounts for approximately 22 million tonnes
#CliffsMining Company’s Wabush/Scully mine in #LabradorCanada, which accounts for 13 million tonnes of tailings
Read more:
https://earthworks.org/issues/environmental-impacts-of-gold-mining/
#WaterIsLife #GoldMine #GoldMining #MercuryPollution #Cyanide