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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, 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.

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

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