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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: 1) by khallow on Monday November 11 2019, @09:08PM (4 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 11 2019, @09:08PM (#919079) Journal

    And I think you grossly overestimate the value of that awareness and the existence of those rules so full of loopholes that they don't actually stop whoever is powerful enough to use lawyers.

    Depends on the metric - workplace injuries and deaths have gone down for decades despite the alleged loopholes. So has pollution per capita. Loopholes don't seem to be working for the "powerful enough" there.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Monday November 11 2019, @09:26PM (3 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 11 2019, @09:26PM (#919093) Journal

    Depends on the metric - workplace injuries and deaths have gone down for decades despite the alleged loopholes. So has pollution per capita.

    In vase you didn't notice, so did the manufacturing and chem ind.
    I'll let you guess where and evaluate the pollution level there.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 11 2019, @09:35PM (2 children)

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 11 2019, @09:35PM (#919098) Journal

      In vase you didn't notice, so did the manufacturing and chem ind. I'll let you guess where and evaluate the pollution level there.

      So you're agreed with me and then moved the goalposts. Now we've expanded the scope from implicitly the US to the world.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Monday November 11 2019, @10:39PM (1 child)

        by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 11 2019, @10:39PM (#919124) Journal

        I just pointed your argument is inconclusive due to the disputable causal relationship (even if one accepts the metrics - which I didn't. Nor did I reject them, mind you)

        --
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 12 2019, @12:16AM

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 12 2019, @12:16AM (#919159) Journal
          What's inconclusive about it? This stuff holds by sector too.