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With the Climate Change summit taking place this week in Copenhagen I asked myself how gold mining damages the environment.  Buying and selling gold is, of course, big business.  There is certainly no shortage of mining companies around the world constantly excavating and looking to sell gold ore for a large profit.  The majority of the gold mining companies are based in the South Africa, America and Australia and have thrived in recent times with investors looking to profit from the high price of gold by buying shares in the mining companies.  The problem with mining gold is that many formerly gold rich veins have been exhausted and for every ounce of mined gold, miners have to excavate and take away almost 30 tonnes of rock.  They do this through open cast mining, where they blast and excavate vast amounts of rock leaving a permanent scar on the landscape.  What’s more in order to separate the Gold ore form the hard rock, companies blast the ore into a fine powder and then use a toxic cyanide solution to dissolve the gold so that it can be extracted.  The problem with these cyanide solutions is the possibility of it leaching into the surrounding soil, damaging the plant and wildlife.  There was one instance in Romania where heavy rainfall and snow caused large amount of cyanide contaminated waste to be released into the river, killing all the fish and contaminating the water supply for two and a half million people.   According to some reports in America metal mining causes more toxic waste than any other industry.  What’s more one of the largest mining companies in the world has, in the last decade, destroyed almost 2,400 acres of rainforest in Papua New Guinea through open cast mining.  So it would seem that gold mining companies will go to almost any length to excavate and sell gold ore for jewellery and other products at great cost to the environment.

Written by Simon Fuller