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posted by Fnord666 on Monday November 11 2019, @04:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-about-venus? dept.

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

The Hidden Cost of Gold: Birth Defects and Brain Damage

CIDAHU, Indonesia — Thousands of children with crippling birth defects. Half a million people poisoned. A toxic chemical found in the food supply. Accusations of a government cover-up and police officers on the take.

This is the legacy of Indonesia's mercury trade, a business intertwined with the lucrative and illegal production of gold.

More than a hundred nations have joined a global campaign to reduce the international trade in mercury, an element so toxic there is "no known safe level of exposure," according to health experts.

But that effort has backfired in Indonesia, where illicit backyard manufacturers have sprung up to supply wildcat miners and replace mercury that was previously imported from abroad. Now, Indonesia produces so much black-market mercury that it has become a major global supplier, surreptitiously shipping thousands of tons to other parts of the world.

Much of the mercury is destined for use in gold mining in Africa and Asia, passing through hubs such as Dubai and Singapore, according to court records — and the trade has deadly consequences.

"It is a public health crisis," said Yuyun Ismawati, a co-founder of an Indonesian environmental group, Nexus3 Foundation, and a recipient of the 2009 Goldman Environmental Prize. She has called for a worldwide ban on using mercury in gold mining.

Mercury can be highly dangerous as it accumulates up the food chain, causing a wide range of disorders, including birth defects, neurological problems and even death.

Today, despite the risks, small-scale miners using mercury operate in about 80 countries in Asia, Africa and the Americas. They produce up to 25 percent of all gold sold.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Monday November 11 2019, @05:31AM (11 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 11 2019, @05:31AM (#918831) Journal

    There is absolutely no need for any mercury to be released into the environment when using modern, environmentally sound mining techniques.

    The problem is that environmentalists don't want to make mining safe, they want to make it impossible, and enlist governments to help them. So it moves to other countries, where corruption cripples what few environmental protections there are, and where illegal miners operate with no oversight whatsoever (even the legitimate owners of the mining claims have a hard time keeping them out). The problem is not mercury, it's corruption, bad regulation and inadequate property rights.

    Half a million people being poisoned would be a massive humanitarian crisis. Looking a little deeper, it turns out that actually 700 people were poisoned, which suddenly inflates to 500,000 because... well, environmentalists love to make up numbers when the real ones don't suit them. Even those 700 are only "suspected" cases. A separate study, which actually tested for mercury, found 558 cases. That is not good, but it's far from what's claimed.

    While nobody wants mercury in the food supply, even 'an element so toxic there is "no known safe level of exposure,"' is inflammatory and misleading.

    Translation: what's the release of a small amount of mercury when it saved so much in operating expenses and increase the profit? Why do you hate capitalism?
    What you propose is red tape and there's only one good word going with it: "cut"

    (I would grin, but I'm abstaining when I see how serious you are)

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 11 2019, @05:43AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 11 2019, @05:43AM (#918832)

    I'm not sure I understand your point.

    North American medium and large scale miners have largely phased out mercury in favor of cyanide leaching (which doesn't sound much better, but it really is). New technology promises to eventually eliminate the need even for that. Small scale miners still use it, but they release little or no mercury to the environment in the process. But because it is increasingly difficult to actually operate mines in North America, mining operations move to countries where there is no concern for the environment at all, resulting in more pollution than if the environmentalists had just stayed out of the way.

    The inflammatory language and misleading numbers used by the article are a completely different problem. It is possible to write an article about a real problem, but still use bad-faith tactics to mislead readers in an attempt to stoke outrage (see also Stallman, Richard and Taubman, Brandon).

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by c0lo on Monday November 11 2019, @06:08AM (2 children)

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 11 2019, @06:08AM (#918835) Journal

      Small scale miners still use it, but they release little or no mercury to the environment in the process.

      Citation needed.

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 11 2019, @06:51AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 11 2019, @06:51AM (#918842)

        https://www.iisd.org/sites/default/files/publications/igf-asm-global-trends.pdf [iisd.org] (page 15, 16, and 17).

        The best environmental practices are found in the Americas, including Latin America. Brazil and Colombia actually come in ranked a little better than Mexico (which came as a surprise to me, I'll admit), but all are ranked far better than Indonesia and Africa. As is typical in environmental problems, most of the pollution in the Americas is produced by a few extreme outlaw emitters; legitimate producers generally use the environmentally sound best practices.

        Mercury-based mining is not used in Canada or the United States at all, and there is not enough gold mining happening in the Caribbean to be worth considering.

        • (Score: 5, Interesting) by c0lo on Monday November 11 2019, @08:00AM

          by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 11 2019, @08:00AM (#918855) Journal

          Mercury-based mining is not used in Canada or the United States at all,

          And this is because...? 'cause I really looked after a ban on using mercury for mining gold in US, and it doesn't seem to be such a thing.

          So, either the practice was abandoned because it was less efficient or because it was too dangerous. Which of the two?

          The best environmental practices are found in the Americas, including Latin America. Brazil and Colombia actually come in ranked a little better than Mexico (which came as a surprise to me, I'll admit), but all are ranked far better than Indonesia and Africa. As is typical in environmental problems, most of the pollution in the Americas is produced by a few extreme outlaw emitters; legitimate producers generally use the environmentally sound best practices.

          Ummmm... Looks like 'best environmental practices' does not manage to obtain zero emissions as you claimed in your opening comment. Page 14 in your linked

          Concentration releases less mercury into the environment, but the amalgam heating stage can still be a source of mercury poisoning if miners do not use protective equipment, such as retorts or fume hoods, which can recover up to 95 per cent of mercury vapours

          Well, yeah, use a gas mask and a fume hood and you ain't gonna poison yourself immediately. Only your neighbors and the environment. Like, you know, the groundwater or the soil.

          FYI, mercury is far from being inert - it is actively transformed in methylmercury [wikipedia.org], which eliminates quite slowly and crosses the blood-brain barrier. As a result, the top predators at the food chain (humans, right?) experience the highest bio-accumulation rate.

          And the results aren't [wikipedia.org] pretty [wikipedia.org] on medium to long term.

          --
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 11 2019, @08:46AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 11 2019, @08:46AM (#918865)

      But because it is increasingly difficult to actually operate mines in North America, mining operations move to countries where there is no concern for the environment at all, resulting in more pollution than if the environmentalists had just stayed out of the way.

      That's a fucking stupid point, and I'm using as nice of a language as I can here. Really.

      Do you actually think that the only people that want to mine gold exist in North America? Do you believe that some these poor areas of the world, where the economy is not exactly well developed, would pass a chance at mining gold just because someone can mine gold in fucking "North America"?

      1. fuck-all to do with North America (translation, self-centered Trumpland)
      2. small-scale mining exists because people want to make lives for their families better
      3. pollution exists because government *oversight* in those countries is piss poor
      4. lack of education is driving pollution higher - many miners know that mercury is poisonous but they don't know it causes birth defects and brain damage in others, down the river. Many causes are that these are the very families of the miners that get exposed. As a plain example of people doing stupid things - how many people still start to smoke today with no regard for those consequences?
      5. like everywhere, there are people in those ares that don't give a fuck about poisoning others.

      The bottom line, you are fucking lucky that environmentalists don't stay out of the way and that the government *and* industry work together to create regulations that protects the environment and us living in it. What we need is minimal environmental policies and enforcement agreements to be part of trade agreements.

      Finally, mines are only going to exist in places where the deposits of these ores exist. No one is going to be mining gold at 0.5g/ton where they have 12g/ton available in another jurisdiction. Environmental regulations are not the main costs of gold mining - energy inputs is the main cost. That is why gold price tracks a multiple of oil price.

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 11 2019, @11:18AM (1 child)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 11 2019, @11:18AM (#918894) Journal

    I believe that some red tape is necessary. https://www.epa.gov/superfund/superfund-history [epa.gov] Those superfund sites are what happens with zero regulation, and no oversight. The shit was hitting the fan the year I graduated from high school, and it was pretty ugly. Corporations had dumped poisons into the water supplies, on the land, and into the air for generations, literally. That was bad enough, so long as the land was kept for industrial use. Love Canal was a true horror story for any parent, or anyone who hopes to be a parent. The land was contaminated with some pretty nasty stuff, then sold for residential use. Kids started getting sick, and it took awhile for people to trace the cause, then to trace the origin of the poisons.

    Even if 80% of companies are responsible enough to keep their backyards clean, the remainder is not. What's a few gallons of oil going to hurt? Or, a few more gallons of PCB's? Or, in the case of mining, what's a hundred gallons of mercury in the course of a year's work?

    Maybe the article exaggerates the claims, as GP says. I can accept that, lots of people exaggerate their claims to get more attention. And, maybe there is no exaggeration, either.

    What I do know with some certainty, is that rules and regulations were effective in cleaning up the US. When it got too expensive for corporate tastes, they moved operations overseas, where there were no rules. Take a shithole nation, or worse, a genuine hellhole with warlords, rebels, corrupt government, and incursions from outside the nation, and allow any corporation to set up operations. You tell me how much the corporation is going to care about the people who live there, alright?

    As much as I hate the idea of a world government, I'm almost willing to concede that we need some kind of authority to chase this kind of crap down. Almost. But, I hate the idea of the UN ruling the world a little bit more than I hate the corporates who exploit everyone and everything they touch.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12 2019, @02:26AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12 2019, @02:26AM (#919194)

      Try to keep your facts straight (I live ~20 miles from Love Canal),
      > Love Canal was a true horror story for any parent, or anyone who hopes to be a parent. The land was contaminated with some pretty nasty stuff, then sold for residential use.

      The story is more complex. Hooker sold it to the Niagara Falls School District, partially under threat of eminent domain that was used to force the sale of nearby property. This was at a time when school enrollment was increasing quickly and there was a need to build more schools. Anyone interested can start here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Canal#Hooker_Chemical_Company [wikipedia.org] and read the next section as well.

      No question the dump contained nasty stuff but it was fairly well buried for the time. Then the school district disturbed the clay cap and other containment when building the school...

  • (Score: 2) by driverless on Monday November 11 2019, @11:45AM (1 child)

    by driverless (4770) on Monday November 11 2019, @11:45AM (#918902)

    Over here they used cyanide to extract gold in huge vats a bit over a century ago. Once they were done with it, they flushed it into a nearby river. Turned the river a lovely blue colour.

    May have killed a few things too.

    • (Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday November 12 2019, @03:15AM

      by dry (223) on Tuesday November 12 2019, @03:15AM (#919208) Journal

      I lived in a place around '81 were this company showed up and wanted to go through some old mine tailings with cyanide. Swore up and down they'd clean up and put up a million dollar bond. At the end they closed shop and vanished with the few million they made and left a $10 million clean up for the tax payers.

  • (Score: 2) by Bot on Monday November 11 2019, @06:51PM (1 child)

    by Bot (3902) on Monday November 11 2019, @06:51PM (#919010) Journal

    Tertium datur, it is entirely feasible to consider TFA alarmist and the mercury contraband unacceptable.

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    Account abandoned.
    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday November 11 2019, @11:09PM

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 11 2019, @11:09PM (#919133) Journal

      Feasible (possible)? May be.
      Plausible or probable? That's something else.

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford