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