#goldmine — Public Fediverse posts

Revealing the reason why the Netherlands transferred dozens of tons of gold out of the US and Canada

On Sep…
#Netherlands #Nederland #NL #Europe #Europa #EU #BankoftheNetherlands #centralbank #Centralbankreservegold #DNB #Dutchgold #geopoliticalinstability #geopoliticalrisks #Gold #goldincrisis #goldinLondon #goldmarket #goldmine #goldprice #goldreserves #internationalnewstoday #Londongold #Londongoldmarket #NewWorldNews #Worldnews #Worldreservegold
https://www.europesays.com/netherlands/42679/

Earthworks: #Environmental Impacts of #GoldMining

Most consumers don’t know where the gold in their products comes from, or how it is mined. Gold mining is one of the most destructive industries in the world. It can displace communities, contaminate drinking water, hurt workers, and destroy pristine environments. It pollutes water and land with mercury and cyanide, endangering the health of people and ecosystems. Producing gold for one wedding ring alone generates 20 tons of waste.

Poisoned Waters

Gold mining can have devastating effects on nearby water resources. Toxic mine waste contains as many as three dozen dangerous chemicals including:

arsenic
lead
mercury
petroleum byproducts
acids
cyanide

Mining companies around the world routinely dump toxic waste into rivers, lakes, streams and oceans – our research has shown 180 million tonnes of such waste annually. But even if they do not, such toxins often contaminate waterways when infrastructure such as tailings dams, which holds mine waste, fail.

According to the UNEP there have been over 221 major tailings dam failures. These have killed hundreds of people around the world, displaced thousands and contaminated the drinking water of millions.

The resulting contaminated water is called acid mine drainage, a toxic cocktail uniquely destructive to aquatic life. According to one study: “The effects of AMD are so multifarious that community structure collapses rapidly and totally, even though very often no single pollutant on its own would have caused such a severe ecological impact.”

These same “multifarious impacts” also makes recovery from such wastes much more difficult.

This environmental damage ultimately affects us — in addition to drinking water contamination, AMD’s byproducts such as mercury and heavy metals work their way into the food chain and sicken people and animals for generations.
The Biggest Polluters:

The top four mines that dump tailings into bodies of water account for 86% of the 180 million tonnes dumped into bodies of water each year. Those mines are:

Freeport McMoRan and #RioTinto’s Grasberg mine in #WestPapua, #Indonesia, which accounts for approximately 80 million tonnes of tailings
Newmont Sumitomo Mining’s Batu Hijau mine in #Indonesia, which accounts for approximately 40 million tonnes
Ok Tedi Mining Ltd.’s Ok Tedi mine in Papua New Guinea, which accounts for approximately 22 million tonnes
#CliffsMining Company’s Wabush/Scully mine in #LabradorCanada, which accounts for 13 million tonnes of tailings

Read more:
https://earthworks.org/issues/environmental-impacts-of-gold-mining/

#WaterIsLife #GoldMine #GoldMining #MercuryPollution #Cyanide

#AmazonForests poisoned by #mercury from #GoldMining

Study finds unprecedented levels of #MercuryPollution

January 28, 2022
by Cheryl Walker

"Wake Forest faculty in the University’s Center for Energy, Environment and Sustainability, and its Center for Amazonian Scientific Innovation (CINCIA) are part of an international team of researchers who have discovered that gold mining in the Amazon rainforest is causing exceptionally high levels of mercury pollution in the old-growth rainforest near the mining sites.

"The total mercury concentrations in a forested area in #Peru’s #LosAmigosConservationConcession were the highest ever recorded.

"The study, 'Amazon Forests Capture High Levels of Atmospheric Mercury Pollution From #ArtisanalGoldMining,' appears Jan. 28 in the journal Nature Communications. The research team was led by Jacqueline R. Gerson, as a Ph.D. student at Duke University.

“What this study found was that the wildest forests left on earth are capturing mercury released by artisanal mining, and at superfund-site levels,” said Miles Silman, Andrew Sabin Presidential Chair of Conservation Biology and Director of Wake Forest’s Center for Energy, Environment and Sustainability. 'The wildlife and humans that live within these wild forests are poisoned as well, with effects that we are just beginning to understand.'

"''This study reveals, for the first time, the mechanism of how mercury released into the air by gold mining contaminates #TropicalForests and forest #soils,' Fernandez said. “This atmospheric mercury, which is either deposited on to leaves or absorbed by leaves, eventually falls to the ground and gets incorporated into forest soils.'

"The region of #MadreDeDios is considered a global #biodiversity hotspot, but in recent decades has suffered an unprecedented #GoldRush. mining is doing irreversible damage to one of the world’s largest remaining pieces of #TropicalRainforest and threatening its survival. In the Madre de Dios region of Peru, east of the Andes Mountains, nearly 250,000 acres of rainforest, roughly the size of Dallas, Texas, have been razed and transformed into somewhere that looks like a desert pockmarked by tens of thousands of mercury contaminated mining ponds by illegal #GoldMining.

"Gold miners use toxic mercury to pull flakes of gold out of the river sediment. Then, they separate the gold from the mercury using open fire ovens. The heat melts the gold and turns the mercury to a toxic vapor.

"'People had a lot of ideas about where mercury might be going in these tropical landscapes, and they turned out to be wrong,' Silman said. 'The paper shows that mercury isn’t staying in the mining zone, but rather that trees are scrubbing mercury from the air and transferring it into forest #ecosystems, and into forest wildlife and peoples, where it moves up the food chain with unknown effects.'

"The study also reveals how these contaminated soils serve as a repository for this deposited mercury, preventing. or at least slowing, its transfer into rivers and lakes where it is transformed into a more toxic form of mercury, #Methylmercury, and contaminate aquatic food webs."

https://news.wfu.edu/2022/01/28/amazon-forests-poisoned-by-mercury-from-gold-mining/

#WaterIsLife #GoldMine
#GoldMining #Cyanide