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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: 5, Insightful) by lentilla on Monday November 11 2019, @06:28AM (5 children)
I have seen a documentary showing these gold prospectors at work. They stand in a stream, and they rub mercury over the gold flecks lying on a piece of cloth, using the running water to flush the impurities out. They do this with their bare hands.
These are people simply trying to make ends meet - and if you took away their mercury they wouldn't be able to complete, especially with the other small-scale miners with access to mercury.
So humanity has a problem: if small-scale miners are allowed access to mercury they will poison everyone else.
In short, I don't believe this is environmentalists trying to spoil everyone's fun - it is a simple case of starving people trying to eek out a living and poisoning everyone in the process. You may well be right about the corruption angle - and then there is the political and sociological issue of telling people they face starvation because they are not allowed access to mercury which; from their perspective; is a welcomed profit multiplier rather than creeping, spreading death.
It's a complicated problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 11 2019, @07:15AM (4 children)
"They do this with their bare hands."
And it poses virtually no risk to them, unless they have open wounds or get it trapped under their fingernails before lunch time.
With proper precautions the stuff is easy to work with. Normally that means gloves, but outside the lab no one bothers, what they worry about is vapours and environmental contamination. In this case the two are the same because they're not recovering the mercury, and that's where the majority of the damage is being done. The fellow producing mercury isn't conjuring it from thin air, it's already in the environment. But because that (air) is where the mercury is being returned, suddenly it's a *huge* problem. Ok, he's getting it out of rocks, not streams, so that's a problem too, but not nearly as bad as the vapour issue.
Mercury is probably easier for the amateur to use safely (assuming they bother to try), since other methods are more hazard prone (in my estimation anyway.) An isolated mercury accident would be more damaging, but they should be far less frequent. Personally I think the best solution here is to educate the prospectors, after all they're probably spending more on wasted mercury than what the safe process would cost. It might be hard convincing them to stop doing mercury tests in the field, but I'd consider anything shy of boiling it off into the atmosphere a huge win — even eating it.
(Score: 4, Informative) by c0lo on Monday November 11 2019, @08:13AM (2 children)
False. They are going eat that mercury with the fishes in that stream and from the vegetables watered from that stream or the groundwater replenished from that stream. If not them, then some other unsuspecting people downstream from them.
And they're going to have that mercury under the form of methylmercury, thanks to the bacterial activity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 11 2019, @01:43PM (1 child)
I was talking about the handling of it, and you knew that. But you skipped the rest of the comment to hit reply so you could go straight to the "nuh-uh mercury bad" spiel because you're trying to win on the internet. Have fun being you for the rest of your life.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Monday November 11 2019, @02:29PM
And I was talking about the long term damage to the environment. But, if you knew that, you just chose to ignore it and present handling as the only major risk.
Now, maybe you knew that, maybe I didn't, I tried to show there are other things that matter when it comes to mercury (and, more general, the "externalize the cost to maximize the profit" approach of the capitalism).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday November 12 2019, @03:19AM
Don't they usually cook the mercury/gold mix to recover the gold by vaporizing the mercury? These are poor people without ready access to the equipment to recover the mercury 100% and mercury vapour is not nice.