20 pictures of whats happening to our earth from garbage and diamond mine
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A global campaign to cold-shoulder what activists are calling "dirty gold" gained its 100th official follower iii days earlier Valentine's Day.
The pledge was launched in 2004 past the environmental group Earthworks, which has asked retail companies not to carry gold that was produced through environmentally and socially subversive mining practices. 8 of the ten largest jewelry retailers in the Us accept at present made the pledge, including Tiffany & Co., Target and Helzberg Diamonds. The No Muddy Gilded campaign is anchored in its "golden rules," a prepare of criteria encouraging the metallic mining industry to respect human rights and the natural environment.
While the listing of retailers aligned in their opposition to muddy golden continues to grow longer, most gold remains quite filthy. The majority of the world's gilded is extracted from open pit mines, where huge volumes of earth are scoured abroad and processed for trace elements. Digging estimates that, to produce enough raw gold to brand a single ring, 20 tons of rock and soil are dislodged and discarded. Much of this waste carries with it mercury and cyanide, which are used to extract the gilt from the rock. The resulting erosion clogs streams and rivers and can eventually taint marine ecosystems far downstream of the mine site. Exposing the deep world to air and water also causes chemical reactions that produce sulfuric acrid, which can leak into drainage systems. Air quality is as well compromised past gold mining, which releases hundreds of tons of airborne elemental mercury every year.
Gilded has traditionally been a gift of love, and, non surprisingly, jewelry sales spike around Valentine's Day. According to a contempo survey released by National Jeweler, almost 20 percentage of Americans who planned to give a Valentine's Day gift this year said they would be buying jewelry—sales estimated to total virtually $four billion. Thus, activists run into Valentine's Day equally a prime opportunity to educate consumers and stifle the merchandise of dirty aureate. Payal Sampat, Excavation' director of the No Muddy Golden campaign, wants consumers to understand the back story of the gold industry. This, she believes, would spur an improvement in mining practices.
"Nosotros believe gold and metal mining tin be done much more than responsibly," Sampat says. "It's feasible, simply consumers need to think almost the impacts they have when they purchase jewelry."
But the need for gold is tremendous at present. Several months ago, gold'due south value hit $1,800 an ounce. It has since dropped to roughly $1,300—though that's all the same five times its price in the late 1990s. The coin to be made at all levels of the industry, from laborers human knee-deep in mud to executive officers reaping thousands of dollars a solar day, creates powerful incentive to notice gold—even though doing so may now exist harder than always. Alan Septoff, communications manager for the No Muddy Aureate campaign, says that hands attainable golden has become scarcer and scarcer through time. "What we have left in near mines is very low-quality ore, with a greater ratio of rock to gold," Septoff said.
This, he explains, makes the energy required to mine that aureate—and the waste and pollution produced in the process—proportionally greater and greater. In other words, dirty aureate is only getting dirtier. What's more, aureate that cannot be traced back to some level of deforestation, air and watershed pollution, and homo injury and death is almost nonexistent, co-ordinate to Septoff.
"At that place is no such affair as clean golden, unless it'due south recycled or vintage," he says.
But James Webster, the curator of mineral deposits at the American Museum of Natural History, says the story is non as night and ane-sided as some may spin information technology. A clean gold mining industry is indeed possible, he says. Moreover, the industry is not equally subversive at it may seem. Some states take strict—and effective—regulations on the treatment of mine waste and runoff, Webster says.
"Cyanide is not as nasty/scary as it may sound," he wrote in an e-mail. "Its one-half-life is cursory in the presence of sunlight."
All the same the Environmental Protection Agency has reported that 40 percent of watershed headwaters in the western The states have been contaminated by mining operations. Many of these are tiny sites, and there are, overall, roughly 500,000 defunct metal mines in 32 western states that the EPA has plans to make clean up. Remediation of these sites may cost more than $35 billion.
One of the largest open up pit mines is located near Salt Lake City—the Bingham Canyon Mine. The deepest mine in the world, it is about iv,000 vertical feet from its rim to the bottom. Bingham Canyon is known as a copper mine, but the site yields gold, too. More than 600 tons of gilt have come out of the mine since its opening in 1906, and every yr, $one.8 billion worth of metals are produced here.
Some other infamous American mine is the Berkeley Pit, in Montana. This mine made the nearby boondocks of Butte rich and prosperous for a time, just the site was eventually exhausted of riches—including copper and gold—and retired. In the decades since, water has seeped into the Berkeley Pit and filled the mine, and today it contains 1 of the almost lethally polluted lakes in the world. The toxic, acidic h2o killed 342 snow geese that landed here in 1995. The h2o, many people fear, will eventually taint the region's groundwater supply.
The Grasberg Mine, in Indonesia, is ane of the largest gold mines in the earth and is owned by American company Freeport McMoRan. The Grasberg Mine is also located smack in the middle of Lorentz National Park, creating such a huge scar on the World that tin be seen from space. The mine dumps virtually eighty million tons of waste debris into the Ajkwa river organisation every year, according to Sampat at Earthworks. Another American company, Newmont, owns the Batu Hijau mine, as well in Indonesia. This performance dumps its waste into the bounding main near the island of Sumbawa.
While the EPA struggles to remediate and restore almost countless mine sites in the United States, and while activists work to stem the tide of demand on the aureate industry, efforts are underway to develop more open pit mines. Among the nigh controversial is the Pebble Mine, proposed for Alaska's Bristol Bay region. The project, critics say, could destroy or seriously damage unspoiled wilderness, wildlife habitat, indigenous cultures and the region'south sockeye salmon fishery. Of the Pebble Mine, Septoff at Earthworks said, "There could not exist a clearer example of a short-term profit gained at a long-term loss."
The road ahead for the Pebble Mine's proponents volition not likely exist a smooth one. A major investor in the project backed out late last yr, and the jewelry manufacture—which uses well-nigh one-half of all gilt mined each year —has expressed opposition to the project. Several days ago, Tiffany & Co.'s chairman and CEO Michael Kowalski told JCK Magazine that developing the Pebble Mine site will almost certainly practise more than damage than information technology'due south worth to the environment, the region's salmon-based economy and the face up of the gold industry itself.
"The possibility of this ending in disaster is so high, it's difficult to see how any mining company could go forward," Kowalski told JCK.
The EPA released a report in January in which the agency said development of the mine would carry many risks of harm to the environmental and civilization of the region.
There is an activist slogan that says, "The more than you know, the less aureate glows."
But ethical, responsibly mined gold may actually be possible. It has been estimated that almost 165,000 metric tons of gold have been mined in all of human history. Most of this aureate is still in apportionment—and a growing number of jewelers are making use of this material. Brilliant Earth, Leber Jeweler and Toby Pomeroy are three companies that take abandoned new gold and opted,instead, to only deal in recycled and 2nd-mitt material, thereby cutting mining out of the equation.
Beth Gerstein, co-founder of Brilliant Earth, based in San Francisco, says there have long been "inconsistencies" between the traditional perceived value of gold as a romantic symbol and the realities of extracting raw gold from the Earth.
"Jewelry is a symbol of commitment and values and we want this to be true inside and out," Gerstein said.
Gerstein, along with her concern partner, launched Bright Earth in 2005, and she says demand for recycled gold has grown since the outset.
"Consumers want to know that the product they're ownership hasn't had a negative impact on the globe," Gerstein said. The gesture of recycled precious metals seems a virtuous 1, and public interest in supporting the effort seems to reflect goodwill. Simply Webster, at the American Museum of Natural History, says that recycling gold has so far done little to offset the destruction of mining.
"Unfortunately, the demand for gold, annually, far exceeds the amount recycled," he wrote.
He even feels that applying whatever symbolic or superficial value to aureate, whether recycled or fresh from an open pit mine, is ultimately only furthering the problems linked to much of the mining industry:
"To me, it is interesting that because the majority of gold that is mined and extracted from ores is directed to the jewelry industry (an enterprise that societies might be able to survive with less of), we could run societies on Earth with much less gold mining."
Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/environmental-disaster-gold-industry-180949762/
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