With This Ring: The Environmental Cost of Gold Mining
Gold mining today resembles dismembering mountains more than panning for nuggets; most mines never unearth a single visible flake. Instead they crush vast amounts of rock, pile it up, and leach out the gold molecules with cyanide.
Mining gold to create a single 1/3-ounce 18-karat ring produces at least 20 tons of waste and 13 pounds of toxic emissions.
Those emissions contain 5.5 pounds of lead, 3 pounds of arsenic, almost 2 ounces of mercury, and 1 ounce of cyanide.
Across the globe, Newmont crushed and disposed of more than 700 million tons of rock in 2004.
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How Mining Companies Make a Mess...
...for taxpayers to clean up.
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Harry Reid, Gold Member
Is our Senate leader in bed with America's worst polluter?
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A Mother Lode of Gold, But at What Price?
A mine in Alaska's Bristol Bay region could produce more gold than the Klondike gold rush—and put the world's largest salmon fishery out of business.
In 2005, Route 766 in Nevada was partially buried by an avalanche involving 10 million tons of waste from a Newmont mine. In Romania, more than 100,000 tons of toxic waste spilled from the Aurul gold mine in 2000, contaminating the drinking water of 2.5 million people and killing at least 1200 tons of fish.
In 2002, the Bush administration changed regulations to allow mine and other industrial waste to be dumped in waterways.
The world's top gold producers (in descending order): South Africa, the U.S., China, Australia, Peru.
Top consumers: India, China, Turkey, Italy, the U.S.
According to the No Dirty Gold campaign, which signs up jewelers to demand better mining practices, the only way to buy "clean" gold is to opt for vintage or recycled jewelry.
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Does anyone have a link for recycled gold products? I would much appreciate it.
Gold mining is indeed devastating to communities and the environment around the world. Help stop irresponsible mining by taking the No Dirty Gold pledge! see http://nodirtygold.org Information on some sources for recycled gold jewelry is also available on that site's FAQ section; if you find other sources, let the No Dirty Gold campaign know!
Gold is used for a multitude of purposes from medical lasers to electronics, not just fancy jewelry. And I agree that regulations are too lax. But pit mining is the only way to extract gold these days, as it is not really laying around in stream beds
anymore. Also mining in the U.S. is FAR better for the environment (globally speaking) than mining in countries with few regulations. It is unfortunately a necessary evil...
In response to Lisa K (gold mining is a necessary evil). Gold is primarily used in jewelry. approximately 80% of all gold mined is used for jewelry, the majority of which is class rings. Only 20% of gold is used for electronics devices or gold bars. Gold is no longer even used to backup U.S. currency any longer. Consumerism is the driving force behind gold extraction - it is vanity that is the majority of the problem.
Don't forget about dirty silver mining practices and the heavy metal containing waste covered-up at the nation's largest Bunker Hill lead superfund site, in the Silver Valley of North Idaho. See silvervalleyaction.com for more information and learn what you can do to help stop the new dump site at the historic Cataldo Mission.
