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Understanding the impacts of mining on local environments and communities

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Article: Understanding the Impacts of Mining on Local Environments and Communities

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Article: Understanding the Impacts of Mining on Local Environments and Communities

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This article explains how mining is impacting communities significantly, especially through depletion of water supply. It mentions how many communities, specifically in Chile but also elsewhere, have been struggling with drought. Also, it talks about how methods like desalination that solve the water crisis are not a permanent fix but instead just a band-aid.

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MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Water, humanity's lifeblood

At the March 2023 United Nations (U.N.) Water Conference in New York, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned "water is in deep trouble. We are draining humanity's lifeblood through vampiric overconsumption and unsustainable use and evaporating it through global heating." A quarter of the world's population already faces "extremely high water stress," according to the World Resources Institute. In an effort to raise awareness of major water-related issues and inspire action for innovative solutions, the U.N. created World Water Day, observed every year on March 22. This year's theme is "Water for Peace," underscoring the fact that even though water is a basic human right and intrinsic to every aspect of life, it is increasingly fought over as supplies dwindle due to problems including drought, overuse, and mismanagement.

The "Water for Peace" theme is exemplified in Fernández and Odell's J-WAFS project, where findings are intended to inform policies to reduce social and environmental harms inflicted on mining communities and their limited water sources.

"Despite broad academic engagement with mining and climate change separately, there has been a lack of analysis of the societal implications of the interactions between mining and climate change," says Odell. "This project is helping to fill the knowledge gap. Results will be summarized in Spanish and English and distributed to interested and relevant parties in Chile, ensuring that the results can be of benefit to those most impacted by these challenges," he adds.
The effects of mining for the clean energy transition
Global climate change is understood to be the most pressing environmental issue facing humanity today. Mitigating climate change requires reducing carbon emissions by transitioning away from conventional energy derived from burning fossil fuels, to more sustainable energy sources like solar and wind power. Because copper is an excellent conductor of electricity, it will be a crucial element in the clean energy transition, in which more solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles will be manufactured. "We are going to see a major increase in demand for copper due to the clean energy transition," says Odell.

In 2021, Chile produced 26 percent of the world's copper, more than twice as much as any other country, Odell explains. Much of Chile's mining is concentrated in and around the Atacama Desert - the world's driest desert. Unfortunately, mining requires large amounts of water for a variety of processes, including controlling dust at the extraction site, cooling machinery, and processing and transporting ore.

Chile is also one of the world's largest exporters of agricultural products. Farmland is typically situated in the valleys downstream of several mines in the high Andes region, meaning mines get first access to water. This can lead to water conflict between mining operations and agricultural communities. Compounding the problem of mining for greener energy materials to combat climate change, are the very effects of climate change. According to the Chilean government, the country has suffered 13 years of the worst drought in history. While this is detrimental to the mining industry, it is also concerning for those working in agriculture, including the Indigenous Atacameño communities that live closest to the Escondida mine, the largest copper mine in the world. "There was never a lot of water to go around, even before the mine," Odell says. The addition of Escondida stresses an already strained water system, leaving Atacameño farmers and individuals vulnerable to severe water insecurity.

What's more, waste from mining, known as tailings, includes minerals and chemicals that can contaminate water in nearby communities if not properly handled and stored. Odell says the secure storage of tailings is a high priority in earthquake-prone Chile. "If an earthquake were to hit and damage a tailings dam, it could mean toxic materials flowing downstream and destroying farms and communities," he says.

Chile's treasured glaciers are another piece of the mining, climate change, and agricultural puzzle. Caroline White-Nockleby, a PhD candidate in MIT's Program in Science, Technology, and Society, is working with Odell and Fernández on the J-WAFS project and leading the research specifically on glaciers. "These may not be the picturesque bright blue glaciers that you might think of, but they are, nonetheless, an important source of water downstream," says White-Nockleby. She goes on to explain that there are a few different ways that mines can impact glaciers.

In some cases, mining companies have proposed to move or even destroy glaciers to get at the ore beneath. Other impacts include dust from mining that falls on glaciers. White-Nockleby says, "this makes the glaciers a darker color, so, instead of reflecting the sun's rays away, [the glacier] may absorb the heat and melt faster." This shows that even when not directly intervening with glaciers, mining activities can cause glacial decline, adding to the threat glaciers already face due to climate change. She also notes that "glaciers are an important water storage facility," describing how, on an annual cycle, glaciers freeze and melt, allowing runoff that downstream agricultural communities can utilize. If glaciers suddenly melt too quickly, flooding of downstream communities can occur.
Desalination offers a possible, but imperfect, solution
Chile's extensive coastline makes it uniquely positioned to utilize desalination - the removal of salts from seawater - to address water insecurity. Odell says that "over the last decade or so, there's been billions of dollars of investments in desalination in Chile."

As part of his dissertation work at Clark University, Odell found broad optimism in Chile for solving water issues in the mining industry through desalination. Not only was the mining industry committed to building desalination plants, there was also political support, and support from some community members in highland communities near the mines. Yet, despite the optimism and investment, desalinated water was not replacing the use of continental water. He concluded that "desalination can't solve water conflict if it doesn't reduce demand for continental water supplies."

However, after publishing those results, Odell learned that new estimates at the national level showed that desalination operations had begun to replace the use of continental water after 2018. In two case studies that he currently focuses on - the Escondida and Los Pelambres copper mines - the mining companies have expanded their desalination objectives in order to reduce extraction from key continental sources. This seems to be due to a variety of factors. For one thing, in 2022, Chile's water code was reformed to prioritize human water consumption and environmental protection of water during scarcity and in the allocation of future rights. It also shortened the granting of water rights from "in perpetuity" to 30 years. Under this new code, it is possible that the mining industry may have expanded its desalination efforts because it viewed continental water resources as less secure, Odell surmises.

As part of the J-WAFS project, Odell has found that recent reactions have been mixed when it comes to the rapid increase in the use of desalination. He spent over two months doing fieldwork in Chile by conducting interviews with members of government, industry, and civil society at the Escondida, Los Pelambres, and Andina mining sites, as well as in Chile's capital city, Santiago. He has spoken to local and national government officials, leaders of fishing unions, representatives of mining and desalination companies, and farmers. He observed that in the communities where the new desalination plants are being built, there have been concerns from community members as to whether they will get access to the desalinated water, or if it will belong solely to the mines.

Interviews at the Escondida and Los Pelambres sites, in which desalination operations are already in place or under construction, indicate acceptance of the presence of desalination plants combined with apprehension about unknown long-term environmental impacts. At a third mining site, Andina, there have been active protests against a desalination project that would supply water to a neighboring mine, Los Bronces. In that community, there has been a blockade of the desalination operation by the fishing federation. "They were blockading that operation for three months because of concerns over what the desalination plant would do to their fishing grounds," Odell says. And this is where the idea of hydrosocial displacement comes into the picture, he explains. Even though desalination operations are easing tensions with highland agricultural communities, new issues are arising for the communities on the coast. "We can't just look to desalination to solve our problems if it's going to create problems somewhere else" Odell advises.

Within the process of hydrosocial displacement, interacting geographical, technical, economic, and political factors constrain the range of responses to address the water conflict. For example, communities that have more political and financial power tend to be better equipped to solve water conflict than less powerful communities. In addition, hydrosocial concerns usually follow the flow of water downstream, from the highlands to coastal regions. Odell says that this raises the need to look at water from a broader perspective.

"We tend to address water concerns one by one and that can, in practice, end up being kind of like whack-a-mole," says Odell. "When we think of the broader hydrological system, water is very much linked, and we need to look across the watershed. We can't just be looking at the specific community affected now, but who else is affected downstream, and will be affected in the long term. If we do solve a water issue by moving it somewhere else, like moving a tailings dam somewhere else, or building a desalination plant, resources are needed in the receiving community to respond to that," suggests Odell.

The company building the desalination plant and the fishing federation ultimately reached an agreement and the desalination operation will be moving forward. But Odell notes, "the protest highlights concern about the impacts of the operation on local livelihoods and environments within the much larger context of industrial pollution in the area."
The power of communities
The protest by the fishing federation is one example of communities coming together to have their voices heard. Recent proposals by mining companies that would affect glaciers and other water sources used by agriculture communities have led to other protests that resulted in new agreements to protect local water supplies and the withdrawal of some of the mining proposals.

Odell observes that communities have also gone to the courts to raise their concerns. The Atacameño communities, for example, have drawn attention to over-extraction of water resources by the Escondida mine. "Community members are also pursuing education in these topics so that there's not such a power imbalance between mining companies and local communities," Odell remarks. This demonstrates the power local communities can have to protect continental water resources.

The political and social landscape of Chile may also be changing in favor of local communities. Beginning with what is now referred to as the Estallido Social (social outburst) over inequality in 2019, Chile has undergone social upheaval that resulted in voters calling for a new constitution. Gabriel Boric, a progressive candidate, whose top priorities include social and environmental issues, was elected president during this period. These trends have brought major attention to issues of economic inequality, environmental harms of mining, and environmental justice, which is putting pressure on the mining industry to make a case for its operations in the country, and to justify the environmental costs of mining.
What happens after the mine dries up?
From his fieldwork interviews, Odell has learned that the development of mines within communities can offer benefits. Mining companies typically invest directly in communities through employment, road construction, and sometimes even by building or investing in schools, stadiums, or health clinics. Indirectly, mines can have spillover effects in the economy since miners might support local restaurants, hotels, or stores. But what happens when the mine closes? As one community member Odell interviewed stated: "When the mine is gone, what are we going to have left besides a big hole in the ground?"

Odell suggests that a multi-pronged approach should be taken to address the future state of water and mining. First, he says we need to have broader conversations about the nature of our consumption and production at domestic and global scales. "Mining is driven indirectly by our consumption of energy and directly by our consumption of everything from our buildings to devices to cars," Odell states. "We should be looking for ways to moderate our consumption and consume smarter through both policy and practice so that we don't solve climate change while creating new environmental harms through mining."

One of the main ways we can do this is by advancing the circular economy by recycling metals already in the system, or even in landfills, to help build our new clean energy infrastructure. Even so, the clean energy transition will still require mining, but according to Odell, that mining can be done better. "Mining companies and government need to do a better job of consulting with communities. We need solid plans and financing for mine closures in place from the beginning of mining operations, so that when the mine dries up, there's the money needed to secure tailings dams and protect the communities who will be there forever," Odell concludes.

Overall, it will take an engaged society - from the mining industry to government officials to individuals - to think critically about the role we each play in our quest for a more sustainable planet, and what that might mean for the most vulnerable populations among us.

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mit environmental solutions initiative (esi)

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mit program in science technology and society

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abdul latif jameel water and food systems lab (j-wafs)

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Understanding the impacts of mining on local environments and communities

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J-WAFS researchers Scott Odell, a visiting researcher in MIT's Environmental Solutions Initiative, and John Fernández, a professor in MIT's Department of Architecture, are examining climate change, copper mining, and desalination, and their environmental and social impacts on Indigenous communities, glaciers, and agriculture in Chile.

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Environmental Consequences of the Gold Rush - Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)

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Article: Environmental Consequences of the Gold Rush

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Article: Environmental Consequences of the Gold Rush

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This article provides a warning as society goes into the next mining boom with our necessity for a change to renewable energy. It shows the aftereffects of the United States’ last mining boom, the Gold Rush. This insight allows us to see that the Gold Rush totally changed the ecosystems in our country and allows us to see that the same thing may happen after our current uptick in mining.

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The Klondike Gold Rush of 1897-1898 was over almost as soon as it began. During two years, thousands of people traveled from the coast to Dawson City. This influx had a lasting impact on the landscape and native people along the route north. Explore some of these changes:

Changes along the Chilkoot Trail

Tlingit people have used the Chilkoot Trail for hundreds of years as a trade route. This corridor, between Dyea and the Interior, allowed them to trade with Tagish communities. The trail was well established, but the Tlingits limited the number of people using it. During the gold rush thousands of people began using the trail. As they traveled this narrow valley, they had a huge impact on the land.

These gold seekers transported their required " ton of goods" using every means possible. Pack animals, carts, sleds, human strength, and elaborate tramways were all used. It was impossible for anyone to move their supplies to Lake Bennett in one trip.

Camps appeared along the trail as stampeders moved their gear. Stampeders cleared areas to set up tents, businesses, and shelters in these new camps. Camps consumed an enormous amount of trees. Hundreds of people used wood as fuel to cook their food. Timber was used to build the rough frames for tents, saloons, restaurants, and hotels. As camps developed into small cities, the forest around them began to disappear.

At the end of the trails, stampeders reached the shores of Lake Lindeman and Lake Bennett. At the lakes they needed more lumber than ever. In additions to fueling stoves and building structures, they also had to build boats. During the winter of 1897-98 stampeders built over 7,000 boats. Sawmills popped up on the lake shores as they began cutting down the trees closest to the lakes. As more people arrived, newcomers had to search farther away to find trees to harvest.

Deforestation and Erosion Change the Aquatic Ecosystems

Without the forest, other things began to change along the trails. Deforested hillsides easily erode. Roots and moss hold soil in place. Without them, dirt washes off in rainstorms and flash floods. Deforested hills are more prone to landslides.

The runoff from hills into streams harms aquatic ecosystems. Aquatic plants can grow out of control from extra nutrients in the runoff and choke the water flow. Silty water hampers the growth of aquatic insects, and the survival of fish species.Fish struggle with sediment-filled water. It makes them hard to see their predators and prey and clogs their gills making it hard to breathe.

Erosion was not the only aquatic problem during the Klondike Gold Rush. Human and animal waste, rotting horse carcasses, and trash also polluted waterways.

Transportation Resources

Individual stampeders were not the only ones looking for timber. Steamboats began transporting people and supplies up and down the Yukon River. Their engines required cords of wood to propel the large boats, especially going upriver. A cord of wood is a pile of logs four feet wide, four feet tall, and eight feet long.

The most convenient timber grew along the Yukon River. On the trip to Dawson, steamships would stop at lumber camps along the river. Often these camps belonged to First Nations people in the Yukon.

Over-harvesting

Stampeders did not encounter an uninhabited, untouched environment on their journey to the Klondike. Alaska Native and First Nations communities existed in the area for thousands of years. They had their own hunting and foraging traditions.

The number of stampeders overwhelmed the available resources. Stampeders tried new, local foods. Rose hips, mushrooms, berries, and goose eggs became part of their diet.

Stampeders hunted local game. What once was a seasonal hunt turned into a year-round activity. Moose, caribou, mountain goats, and other animals were all harvested. As people hunted, local animal populations disappeared. Anyone hunting had to travel farther to find game. For First Nations hunters, this meant altering traditions.

The exact numbers moose and caribou consumed are unknown. Historian Robert McCandless estimates that Dawson City had about 9,000 people in 1904. His educated guess is that this population consumed 900 moose and 2,300 caribou a year. This population was much smaller than at the height of the gold rush. In 1899-1900 Dawson City's population was about 20,000 people. Consuming moose and caribou at the same rate, 1,800 moose, 4,600 caribou were killed.

We do not have estimates for other harvested species like mountain sheep, bears, and ptarmigans.

Early Mining

Even the first miners in the Klondike Gold Rush had an impact on the environment. As more miners arrived to the area, they used more natural resources and the impact increased.

Mining activities became a year-round activity. Miners adapted to winter conditions to continue mining. Underground fires softened frozen soil, but added an element of danger. If the earth thawed too much, then the mine shaft could collapse. Fumes from the fire could also be deadly. Any fire required timber to feed it.

In the summer, miners re-routed streams into above ground sluice boxes. The diverted water in the sluice boxes washed the gold from the mined gravel. This engineering changed the natural flow and locations of streams. Once gravel was stripped of gold, it was placed into a huge waste pile. These waste piles are known as tailings.

Gold Dredges Arrive in the Yukon

In the early 1900s, dredges arrived in the Yukon. Dredges allowed people to mine on a much larger scale. A chain of huge buckets scooped material up and dumped it onto a conveyor belt. Next, a large volume of water washed any gold out of the soil. Tailings of waste gravel and dirt piled up around the dredges.These piles remain today in the Klondike. They are visible reminders of the major human-caused landscape changes.

The first dredges were powered by steam, requiring tons of cordwood for fuel. Much of this wood came from the hills surrounding the mining areas. After just 10 years, the Bonanza and Eldorado Creek areas were bare and deforested. In photos the hills appear almost lifeless.

Katherine Morse observed "[g]old seekers stripped vegetation from the earth, rerouted streams, and completely altered long stretches of stream valleys. In order to produce gold, they consumed whole ecosystems, or rather the pieces of whole ecosystems, broken into constituent parts in the form of endless piles of wood and dirt and carefully channeled streams of water."

On-going Mining and Landscape Recovery

The Klondike Gold Rush left scars on the landscape that are still healing. Some places, like the Chilkoot and White Pass Trails, have recovered greatly. Other places, like the Klondike mining area, are still changing.

Gold mining still takes place outside of Dawson City. Modern mining often uses chemicals like cyanide to separate gold from other minerals. These chemicals can filter into human water sources and the broader environment. They are harmful to humans as well as plants, animals, and ecosystems.

The Klondike Gold Rush is often cited as an important step in opening "the last frontier." But it had lasting effects for the people, plants, and animals who were here before the rush.

References:

The Nature of Gold, an environmental history of the Klondike Gold Rush, by Katherine Morse

Gold Fever: Race to the Klondike! (park movie)

Nature of Southeast Alaska, by Richard Carstensen, Robert H. Armstrong, and Rita M. O'Clair

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Environmental Consequences of the Gold Rush - Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)

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The Klondike Gold Rush of 1897-1898 was over almost as soon as it began. During two years, thousands of people traveled from the coast to Dawson City. This influx had a lasting impact on the landscape and native people along the route north.

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Visual Aid: All of the Metals Mined Around the World

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Visual Aid: All of the Metals Mined Around the World

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This visual statistic shows how billions of different metals are mined every year. There isn’t just one metal that is mined, but there are many different ones. The variety and volume of the metals mined shows us that as a society, we will have a difficult time turning away from mining because we use so many different metals.

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Understanding mining's lasting effects on Indigenous communities

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Article: Understanding Mining’s Lasting Effects on Indigenous Communities

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Article: Understanding Mining’s Lasting Effects on Indigenous Communities

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This article highlights the growing effects that mining is having on Indigenous tribes. It shows how environmental waste is not being dealt with properly, leading to the suffering of Native Americans who border the mines. Additionally, it mentions how Indigenous communities are not always fully aware of the plans or operations of the mines, leading them to go in blindly when they are asked to input their opinions on the operations.

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National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences

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Environmental soil scientist Lydia Jennings, Ph.D., (see sidebar) shared the harsh effects mining can have on environmental health, and how Indigenous-led collaboration can help, during a July 24 lecture, "From Metal Mining to Data Mining: How Indigenous Data Governance Supports Indigenous Sovereignty Within an Open Science Ecosystem."

Mining Arizona

Arizona has 22 federally recognized tribes that encompass 24% of the state's land, Jennings shared. About half of the state's mines are located on, or border, tribal communities.

Copper mining, in particular, creates land disturbances and generates large quantities of waste. Moreover, mining extraction creates a byproduct called mine tailings, finely ground up material about the size and consistency of cooking flour. What to do with this waste to minimize its effects on the environment and neighboring communities remains problematic.

"In the Sonoran Desert, where it's dry and windy, mine tailings can easily get into the local dust emissions, increasing mobility of these small particles into the air and water," said Jennings.

From metal mining to data mining

The federal government has a legal obligation to consult with tribal nations regarding extraction projects, but the degree to which this occurs can vary, according to Jennings.

"Increasingly, we hear of 'collaborative consultation,' which means that there's more of a collaborative decision-making process between tribal nations, industry, and federal agencies, and that tribes have an ability to influence decision-making outcomes," said Jennings. "What many tribes continue to push for is informed consent early and frequently in project timelines. It maximizes opportunities for mutual collaboration and co-satisfactory outcomes."

Data should be included in this collaborative consultation process.

"Within an Indigenous data framework, we are often thinking of data as much more expansive," said Jennings. "It's our cultural and traditional knowledge, our archival and oral histories, and environmental data, such as GIS mapping, soil health metrics, and plant species biodiversity. All of those are a part of this bigger definition of Indigenous data, and how we steward that not just for ourselves in the present, but for the many generations in the future. Within an open science environment, oversharing sensitive data can be an issue to tribal communities."

Tribal consultation

There are challenges to the governance of Indigenous data, or Indigenous data sovereignty, such as who has responsibility and ownership of that information.

"We have more researchers than ever engaging in traditional ecological knowledge as a way to address our environmental health and our changing climate," said Jennings. "But what are the responsibilities of those scientists to think about data rights, and also of our community experts who want to use data in a way that can support contemporary environmental issues? This is why Indigenous data governance is vital. It brings back governance power to tribal nations and can result in better science grounded by the expertise of the community."

Liam O'Fallon, health specialist with the Population Health Branch and the event host, said Jennings combines her expertise in soil research - examining the use of Indigenous knowledge in soil remediation practices from metal extraction - with issues of tribal data sovereignty.

"Dr. Jennings demonstrated the valuable knowledge a person gains from a meandering career journey. She wove together an engaging presentation highlighting the parallels between rock mining and data mining, the impacts on tribal communities, and the need for meaningful tribal consultations," O'Fallon said. "These issues of tribal environmental health, Indigenous knowledge, and data sovereignty are areas of interest to NIEHS and the work we support."

Read about the 'CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance to learn more about Jennings' work.

Citation: Jennings L, Anderson T, Martinez A, Sterling R, Chavez DD, Garba I, Hudson M, Garrison NA, Carroll SR. 2023. Applying the 'CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance' to ecology and biodiversity research. Nat Ecol Evol; doi: 10.1038/s41559-023-02161-2 [Online 9 Aug 2023].

(Erica Hinton is a contract writer for the NIEHS Office of Communications and Public Liaison.)

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Understanding mining's lasting effects on Indigenous communities

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Learning the widespread impact of mining tribal lands requires Indigenous-led collaboration and sharing of information, says lecturer.

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This image illustrates that in some cases, mines are reclaimed after they stop being operational. In these cases, the areas mined are made back into usable area and in some cases look better than they did before they were mined. This provides hope because some of the mining companies actually care about the environmental impacts of their business and put in time to restore the environment.

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How ending mining would change the world

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Article: How Ending Mining Would Change the World

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Article: How Ending Mining Would Change the World

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This article conveys how although it may not be well-liked among society, we need mining. It talks about how we rely on the metals that come from mining and if we totally shut down all mining, we would see effects within days. Supply chains would be totally interrupted, jobs would be lost, and resources would be scarce. Although it is ruining our environment, mining is needed in some sort of capacity.

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A labourer works at the "White Mountain" limestone extraction quarry site near Egypt's southern city of Minya (Credit: Khaled Desouki/Getty Images)

Mining fuels the modern world, but it also causes vast environmental damage. What would happen if we tried to do without it?

"If you can't grow it, you have to mine it" goes the miner's credo. The extraction of minerals, metals and fuels from the ground is one of humankind's oldest industries. And our appetite for it is growing.

Society is more dependent on both greater variety and larger volumes of mined substances than ever before. If you live in a middle-income country, every year you use roughly 17 tonnes of raw materials - equivalent to the weight of three elephants and twice as much as 20 years ago. For a person in a high-income country, it is 26 tonnes - or four and a half elephants' worth.

Extracting new materials continues to be cheaper than re-use for many substances, leading some experts to sound the warning about the increasing pressure of mines on the natural world. A growing chorus is concerned that environmental toll of mine-caused pollution and biodiversity loss, as well as the social impacts caused to local communities, could sometimes outweigh the benefits of mining.

But what if we stopped extraction of fossil fuels and minerals entirely? What if, in order to better protect the environment, humanity decided the contents of the Earth's crust were off limits?

It's an unlikely scenario, to be sure, and one that would cause hardship for many people - particularly if it happened suddenly. But imagining a world without access to the underground allows us to examine how dependent we have become on this ongoing extraction. It also invites us to consider the frivolousness with which we often then throw these materials away, and to examine the overlooked potential in this waste as a source of new materials.

So could considering the end of mining help to change how we use materials today?

What if we stopped all mining tomorrow?

Victor Maus, a researcher in geoinformatics and sustainability at the University of Economics and Business in Vienna, Austria, has spent the last three years poring over satellite images of the Earth's surface to estimate the total area humans currently give over to mining. The results surprised him. "It's a country-sized area, and that's just with the mines that are reported," he says.

The land size of mining had never been surveyed by satellite before, making it tricky to train a computer how to identify mines from thousands of photos. Maus and his team therefore had no choice but to make his estimates by eye, and spent hours tracing polygons around the shapes of open pits, shafts and waste tailings ponds. "I was seeing polygons in my sleep," he says.

Above ground, he found, mining sites covered around 100,000 sq km (38,600 sq miles), larger than Austria or five times the size of Wales. "And that's just the mines that are active," says Maus.

Mining is also one of the most basic forms of enterprise, and many locations are unreported. "In reality, the world's total mining area is even larger."

On the first day of a world that stopped mining, the activity across this collective expanse would grind to a halt. Workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo's deep cobalt pits would drop their shovels, colossal bucketwheels in Germany's brown coal mines would cease to strip mine, and the small boats in the Mekong delta would stop sucking up sands.

The first shockwave would be to jobs. Across the world, ending mining would terminate an estimated four million formal jobs in the industry. And the toll wouldn't stop there.

"There's a number of [further] people that rely indirectly on mining sites that would make it greater," says Eléonore Lèbre, who researches the social impacts of mining from the University of Queensland. More than 100 million livelihoods in work connected to artisanal mining - groups and individuals that mine on smaller scale, often informally - would be lost.

Lèbre's research has involved studying the effect of mine closure on towns in remote Australia. "In rural areas, where there might have been mining operations for decades, you have communities that have grown to depend on them." In a world of no mining, ghost towns would be created almost overnight.

The town of Pedro de Valdivia, Chile, was deserted when a nearby mine closed. In a world of no mining, ghost towns would be created almost overnight (Credit: M.Bernetti/Getty)

These impacts wouldn't stay confined to those communities for long. By day seven, massive ripples would be felt in society. "Energy would be the chief worry," says John Thompson, a mining consultant and professor of sustainability based in Vancouver. "And coal would be the first to go."

Coal is heavy and bulky, so it moves around the world in short supply chains - often going straight from mine to power plant. "Because it takes up so much space, power stations don't have much to rely on in terms of stockpiles," he says. The constant conveyor belt would empty very quickly if mining came to an end.

To cope with this cut off from electricity, governments might begin looking to the past. The UK's mining strikes of the 1970s, where rolling blackouts and electricity rations were enforced, could be used as a form of damage control. "The three-day-week policy could make a comeback," says Thompson, referring to how the UK government reduced working and manufacturing to three days instead of five to handle the electricity shortage from the strikes and the oil crisis of 1973.

An indirect, but crippling effect of such electricity drops in the modern day would be the cut to communications. The internet, many of whose servers still rely on coal-powered electricity, would be slashed or reduced. Mobile phone networks might hang on for longer, but with less electricity in the grid, charging devices could become a luxury. Corded land lines, which are connected to centralised telephone exchanges, would last longest - at least as long as back-up generators and batteries could keep them going.

Soon after, bulky materials would become scarce. Stocks of sand and gravel, which are essential ingredients for making concrete, are relatively shallow. Reserves of the two would be depleted within two to three weeks, says Thompson.

"Sand and gravel are the most mined solid materials by mass," says Aurora Torres, who researches the environmental pressures of sand use at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium. "We mine vastly more sand than anything." The UN estimates we get through 40-50 billion tonnes of sand per year. (Read more about the world's extraordinary demand for sand.)

There is some capacity to recycle used concrete, but the rate at which we use fresh concrete far outstrips current recycling rates. There would also be quality concerns. "Most recycled concrete is 'downcycled' to lower-grade uses such as road building," says Torres. So while there would be a rush to implement better recycling processes, in the short-term, the building of new homes would plummet.

Meanwhile, the temperature in existing homes would become increasingly uncomfortable as gas stores began depleting after a handful of weeks, reducing power for heating and cooling. In economies that rely on gas-fired power stations for electricity such as the United Arab Emirates (95%), Russia (45%), the US (41%) and the UK (36%), blackouts would become more frequent. Any plastics production able to remain working would be restricted to recyclables as its gas feedstock disappeared.

In a world of no mining, old wastes and tailings ponds could present an opportunity to access metals (Credit: M.Bernetti/Getty)

But there is more to modern society than energy and buildings. "It's after about two months that things would get really interesting, as the mining halt would hit metals," says Thompson. Many mined metals are traded through exchanges in London and New York, where numbers and figures swapped over the trading floor denote the real-life movement of physical stockpiles between warehouses all over the world. For copper, an excellent conductor which is essential for almost all electronics, stockpiles would dwindle to nothing in around six to 10 weeks, Thompson estimates.

Simon Jowitt, an economic geologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, does not mince words on what he thinks the end of metals mining would look like. "It would be the end of society as we recognise it today," he says, noting that we mine more now than we ever have before.

A good example of our increasing reliance on a wide array of metals is the average mobile phone, says Jowitt. In the 1980s, a mobile needed 20 or so different elements. A new smartphone today needs more than twice that. "Modern life is simply minerals- and metals-intensive. We wouldn't be having this conversation without them," he quips via video call from his home in Nevada.

Around three months after the end of mining, stockpiles of rare earth metals and other metals useful to technology would be finished, leading to worrying trends for the pharmaceutical, car, electronics and construction industries. This would lead to massive unemployment that on "a never-before-seen scale", says Thompson.

Artisanal miners collect gravel from the Lukushi river searching for cassiterite - the major ore of tin - in Manono, Democratic Republic of Congo (Credit: J.Kannah/Getty Images)

In a cruel twist of fate, though, despite huge demand for new renewable power, deployment rates of wind and solar power would slump. The paradox of renewables is that, in their current form, they need unprecedented volumes of non-renewable mined materials.

"Increasing renewables, while it means fewer fossil fuels out of the ground, means large upticks in battery metals such as cobalt and nickel," says Thompson. Solar panels demand large amounts of silicon for the semiconductors in their cells. Wind turbines need rare earth metals such as neodymium for powerful magnets that generate electricity with the turn of the blades.

Pressure would soon increase to redirect all metals recycling into renewables. "We do recycle a fair amount already," says Jowitt. "Most of the base metals and a handful of other elements are already recycled at their end-of-life by a rate of more than 50%."

Other metals that are critical to renewables, however, such as rare earths, are "lost by design", he says. "The way we currently use them is inherently non-recyclable." This is because technologies use tiny amounts of more and more elements, all in different ways, making it difficult to separate them to get the individual metals out.

But even if technology developed to extract these tiny quantities of rare earth metals, it's unlikely that it would meet the amount needed to vastly expand renewable energy. "The metals demand is already set to exceed current production many times over," says Jowitt. According to the World Bank, in a world on track to keep global warming below 2C, the annual production of graphite, cobalt and lithium will be five times higher by 2050 than today's production.

Aerial view of the Alto Bandeira iron ore mine in Brazil. Copper, iron, aluminium, zinc, lead and nickel together account for 98% of all mined metals (Credit: M.Pimentel/Getty)

Meanwhile, energy production might need to adapt to smaller, more decentralised systems, probably using already-invented tech. Last year, the environmental campaign group Seas At Risk imagined a society in 2050 that had banned mining in 2020. Bereft of a constant supply of metals, the blueprint completely overhauls the electricity grid, with a transition from large, metals-heavy solar and wind farms to decentralised and low-tech distribution. "Direct hydro- and wind-power were other age-old technologies that made their comeback, not only for industrial applications but even for water-powered household devices," it says. Instead of large lithium-ion batteries, compressed-air systems, thermal energy storage and gravity batteries become the champions of energy storage.

Seas At Risk argues for the importance of rethinking energy consumption in a no-mining scenario, as well as for careful environmental policy. Without a clear vision, controversial biofuel production might make up the energy shortfall, with vast areas of land given over to forestry practices to provide wood as a source of building materials, energy and biofuels.

But the work wouldn't stop there. For Lèbre, who researches mine closure, the closed mines themselves would be a huge source of concern. If all mining stopped there would still be an area at least the size of Austria with degrading and in some cases dangerous levels of heavy metals. "Mining is a process of entropy. We are bringing material from locked-up concentrations underground and letting them out into the world."

Ensuring the clean-up and and rehabilitation of these areas would be vital. Mines usually operate at depths below the water table, which need to be constantly dewatered using pumps. When a mine is abandoned, the ground water gradually refloods underground passages and mineral seams over many months, creating acidic reservoirs of water. Above ground, meanwhile, tailings ponds and piles of low-grade ore with traces of heavy metals lie in wait. "All of this material is exposed to water and oxygen," says Lèbre. Exposing such elements to, well, the elements, wreaks havoc on ecosystems, soils and water supplies through acid leaching. "A mine that is abandoned can have chronic pollution for hundreds if not thousands of years," says Lèbre.

Global inequalities would be seen in this mining clean up too. Maus, in his tracing of polygons across the map, has discovered that the majority of reported mines are located in the tropics, one chapter of a larger shift of mining from the Global North to the Global South over the last century. In a world that ended mining, these regions would have the bigger burden of the clean-up projects.

With healthy soils and water re-established, though, eventually nature would return to mining sites. Wastes and tailings ponds, meanwhile, could present an opportunity to access metals. "Most of a mine's desired elements are [the very same] pollutants present in the waste," says Lèbre.

Mining is not going anywhere anytime soon: in fact, experts predict a new surge in metals and aggregate mining over the coming decades. With the exception of a handful of elements, such as lead and tin, the extraction of all metals is even increasing on a per capita basis, notes Jowitt.

Warranting more concern, perhaps, is the fact that more mining will likely create more land impacts. Mining and biodiversity researcher Laura Sonterand her colleagues recently warned that mining the materials needed for renewable energy will increase the threats to biodiversity. Without careful planning, these new threats could surpass those avoided by climate change mitigation.

Perhaps in time, the concept of material footprints, as an addition to carbon footprints, will catch on with governments, as they increasingly realise how much care we need to take of all our non-renewable resources.

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How ending mining would change the world

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Mining fuels the modern world, but it also causes vast environmental damage. What would happen if we tried to do without it?

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Visual Aid: Water Pollution Due to Mining

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Visual Aid: Water Pollution Due to Mining

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This picture provides a representation of the pollution that mining causes. Not only do mining operations deplete water, but they also pollute it heavily. This image shows that in many areas, clear, blue water turns into water that can never be used again.

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Visual Aid: Uptick in Mining of Lithium in Recent Years

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Visual Aid: Uptick in Mining of Lithium in Recent Years

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This graph depicts how in the past decade or so, the amount of lithium mined has more than quintupled. This makes sense as people continue to turn to electric cars which require lithium. This trend suggests that the mining will continue to increase as the years go on.

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Mining is necessary for the green transition. Here's why experts say we need to do it better

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Article: Mining is Necessary For the Green Transition. Here’s Why Experts Say We Need to Do It Better

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Article: Mining is Necessary For the Green Transition. Here’s Why Experts Say We Need to Do It Better

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This article explains the need for mining but also the need for cleaner mining. It talks about how we need metals more than ever due to the green transition. Many green solutions like electric cars and wind turbines have integral parts made of metal. However, it emphasizes that as we turn more to mining, we need to do it cleaner. Our mining processes are harmful, and as we mine more, we need to find a more efficient and less harmful way to carry out the process.

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In order to curb planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate climate change, experts are urging policymakers to swap oil and gas for renewables, bolster electric transit and take other steps to swiftly decarbonize the global economy. That makes more mining inevitable.

In fact, clean energy options typically require more minerals than their fossil-fueled counterparts, according to the International Energy Agency. The agency notes that onshore wind plants, for example, need nine times as many of these resources as gas-powered plants.

The bulk of mining for these materials happens outside the United States in communities that often have a complicated relationship with the industry. Mines bring jobs, but they can also lead to local pollution or devastating accidents, and workers can be subjected to myriad human rights abuses.

The Democratic Republic of Congo is the world's largest producer of cobalt, a high-demand metal used in lithium-ion batteries that power products like laptops, mobile phones and electric vehicles. The mining industry that extracts this resource in that country is known to utilize child labor and impose working conditions that have been likened to slavery. Mining cobalt also results in local environmental degradation, including water pollution and habitat loss.

Experts say it's crucial to figure out how we can mine more responsibly and efficiently to meet the needs of the clean energy transition, and some note that part of the answer also requires consumers to think more critically about their energy demands.

Here's a look at what metal mining entails, and what researchers say we can be doing more to minimize its social and ecological consequences.

How metal mining affects the environment

When our ancestors began making metal tools around 7,000 years ago, this technological advancement spurred humanity's "oldest form of pollution," said Mark Macklin, a professor and co-director of the Lincoln Center for Water and Planetary Health at the University of Lincoln in England. That's because each step of mining and processing those metals released new contaminants into the environment.

While the inherent tradeoff of pollution endures, all these millennia later, mining operations have changed a lot. Different materials require different approaches, but Odell offered the example of modern-day copper mines as a case study.
READ MORE: How NASA's robotic prospectors could pave the way for future asteroid miners
He noted that copper has and will continue to be used across all kinds of technologies since it's a good conductor of electricity and relatively abundant, which makes it affordable. Chile produces the bulk of the world's copper - 27 percent - while the U.S. produces just 6 percent, according to the World Economic Forum.

"The main reason we use copper in the clean energy transition is the reason we use it for everything else, too," Odell said.

At these mines, workers dig as deep as necessary to locate an ore deposit, setting aside the earth they had to remove to get to it. They then extract the metallic material that will later be transformed into pure copper.

Workers start processing that ore on-site, which requires the use of hazardous chemicals. After that, Odell said, the material is shipped elsewhere to be smelted, an energy-intensive, carbon-emitting process that involves burning away everything that isn't copper.

Odell noted that mine workers spray water to reduce the amount of dust that could otherwise make its way from the mining site to contaminate local agricultural fields or water sources with heavy metals. He said this potential for contamination, plus the significant water use, is a frequent source of conflict between mining operations and the communities they border.

Furthermore, the waste generated by the mining operation - including the chemicals used during on-site processing - has to be stored somewhere. Structures called tailings dams are built with the intention of containing that waste indefinitely. But when they fail, the consequences have devastating impacts for local communities and the environment.

"If the mine lasts 60 years, you're going to have tailings left there for hundreds of years, and somebody needs to manage that," Odell said.

A legacy of contamination

Active mines come with many risks, but Macklin's research suggests that inactive or legacy mines can pose an even greater threat to the environment.

Prior to modern regulations, waste was discharged into nearby waterways, turning local river systems into contamination sites, he said.

Trace contaminants like lead or arsenic traveled downstream and settled in the sediment. In some cases, those metal concentrations remain unsafe for human and environmental health today.
WATCH: Residents in the Southwest struggle with the health effects of nuclear ore extraction
"Once you pollute those floodplains, you in effect pollute them forever," Macklin said. Globally, an estimated 23 million people live on floodplains that, due to active or legacy mining, are "affected by potentially dangerous concentrations of toxic waste," according to a recent study that he and his team conducted.

Flooding is one of several extreme weather events that are becoming more common due to climate change. When contaminant-polluted rivers flood, Macklin said, the sediment that holds them can wash over the banks and into the plants and soil beyond.

"Unfortunately, because of climate change, this is coming back to bite us on the backside in a way which is completely unexpected."

That's bad news for livestock farmers who want to let their animals graze on those plants, or people who want to grow crops in that soil. Once sediment is polluted, he explained, there's virtually no safe way to clean it up.

Macklin said that industrialized countries that believe pollution resulting from long-inactive mining operations is only in their past misunderstand the true toll.

"There's been a degree of ... smugness in the Global North in terms of, 'Yes, we polluted our river systems 100 years ago, and we've learned from that,'" he said. "Actually, we learned nothing at all. And unfortunately, because of climate change, this is coming back to bite us on the backside in a way which is completely unexpected."

Today, more than half of projects that would extract minerals for clean energy technologies are on or near Indigenous land, according to a study from the University of Queensland.

"We need to recognize that the mining that we're using to solve climate change is also putting vulnerable communities at risk," Odell said, noting that Indigenous communities are among those who already face disproportionate challenges due to climate change.

Current and future mining projects can do better, but experts say doing so will take careful planning.

Metal mining moving forward

Many people aren't aware of the ecological implications of producing the goods we use in general, noted Corby Anderson, director of the Kroll Institute for Extractive Metallurgy at the Colorado School of Mines.

"Whenever humans engage in any activity on the Earth - be it agriculture or mining or you name it - somehow, the earth becomes involved and the earth gets changed," Anderson said. "And it's a matter of, socially, what do we accept, or what don't we?"

In places like the U.S., consumers are largely geographically removed from any social or environmental toll caused by the mining operations that make possible their technologies of choice.
READ MORE: Analysis: Why Biden declared solar panels, heat pumps integral to national defense
The domestic mining industry would be keen to open new operations on U.S. soil where possible, Anderson said. But he pointed to negative public opinion on mining, lengthy permitting processes and a lack of skilled professionals as factors that curtail the industry's ability to expand in this country.

If the U.S. doesn't pursue more domestic mining and processing, the nation will remain primarily dependent on imported resources used to manufacture green technologies, plus imports of those products themselves, Anderson said.

"We have very good social and environmental practices" in the U.S., so it makes sense to Anderson to develop more mining and processing capacity, he wrote in an email. He added that remaining dependent on other non-ally countries for that material creates "unneeded risks for the survival of our democratic society."

Odell agrees that the strength of government regulation and environmental analysis does position the U.S. to mine better than some of its international counterparts. He also noted that, given the degree to which the nation's greenhouse gas emissions have contributed to climate change, it makes sense to absorb a fairer share of the impact of metal production for clean technologies.

But Odell added that given how rapidly scientists say we need to reduce carbon emissions to keep the planet from warming even further, the U.S. doesn't have time to ramp up domestic mining and meet its own clean energy goals. Opening new mining operations takes years, he said, which means the country will for now inevitably remain largely dependent on imported resources.

"Right now, today, we should be improving our mining regulations and trying to advance our mining for the longer term," he said. "But in the short term, we can't ignore that we're going to need to be getting those from other countries."

To understand what future contamination would look like from new projects, Macklin said that the model he and his colleagues have developed to map legacy mining contamination could be useful. Contaminant release of some kind is inevitable due to forces like human error, he noted, but companies could use that model to understand the potential damage ahead of time.
READ MORE: Analysis: Boosting EV market share to 67% of new sales is a huge leap, but automakers can rise to the challenge
His team is also working on modeling future flooding scenarios. By predicting how historic floodplains might grow or shrink as the planet warms, it could help them understand what legacy contamination spread would look like in the context of climate change.

Experts say these steps and others, like ramping up recycling infrastructure so that metals can be more easily and efficiently reused, are key to implementing a more sustainable industry approach that can still meet the technological needs of our society moving forward. But Odell emphasized that simply swapping the old for the new won't cut it.

He said it's important to consider ways to lower energy use, rather than trying to power our existing lifestyles with renewables. Improving public transit, making cities more walkable and bikeable, and investing in other social policy and infrastructure projects, he added, could all help reduce energy consumption and, by extension, demands for mined metals.

"Do we need to replace all the energy that we use now just with clean energy, or can we find ways to be more efficient with our energy use overall?" Odell said.
Correction: The name of MIT's Environmental Solutions Initiative was misidentified in this story. It has been updated. We regret the error. This story was also updated to clarify Corby Anderson's title as director of the Kroll Institute for Extractive Metallurgy.

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Mining is necessary for the green transition. Here's why experts say we need to do it better

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How to balance the mining demands of the green transition with the industry's social and environmental implications is one of the many topics of discussion at the ongoing COP28 climate conference in Dubai.

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Can we mitigate environmental impacts from mining?

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Article: Can We Mitigate Environmental Impacts From Mining?

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Article: Can We Mitigate Environmental Impacts From Mining?

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This article provides insight on ways to keep areas in and around mines from being affected. Some of the ways like reclamation and soil treatment can totally restore the land. Also, processes like water treatment and acid drainage prevention can keep the contamination from spreading. These ways can help restore past mines, but more importantly, they can be implemented in future mines to mitigate even more damage.

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Material adapted from: Hudson, T.L, Fox, F.D., and Plumlee, G.S. 1999. Metal Mining and the Environment, p. 11,41-46. Published by the American Geosciences Institute Environmental Awareness Series. Click here to download the full handbook.
The major potential environmental impacts associated with mining and associated mineral processing operations are related to erosion-prone landscapes, soil and water quality, and air quality. These potential impacts are recognized and addressed in current mining operations as well as in some former mining operations by reclaiming areas of physical disturbance to prevent erosion, stabilizing soils containing metals or chemicals to prevent unwanted metal releases into the environment, preventing and/or treating water contamination, and controlling air emissions.

Mitigating impacts

At many sites, the key reclamation, soil treatment, and water quality concerns owe their origin to the same process - the oxidation of sulfide minerals, especially the iron sulfide, pyrite. Oxidation of sulfide minerals can produce acidic conditions that release metals in both waste materials and water.

Mining in the early days took place at a time when environmental impacts were not as well understood and, most importantly, not a matter of significant concern. As a result, historical mine sites may still have areas that are not reclaimed, remnants of facilities, and untreated water. This inherited legacy of environmental damage from mining is not indicative of the mining cycle today.

Now, mine closure and a number of activities to mitigate the impacts of mining are an integral part of all metal mine planning and mineral development from the discovery phase through to closure:
Reclamation
Reclamation entails the re-establishing of viable soils and vegetation at a mine site. Although regulatory agencies may require complex reclamation designs, simple approaches can be very effective. One simple approach depends on adding lime or other materials that will neutralize acidity plus a cover of top soil or suitable growth medium to promote vegetation growth. Modifying slopes and other surfaces and planting vegetation as part of the process stabilizes the soil material and prevents erosion and surface water infiltration. Even this simple approach is likely to cost a few thousand dollars per acre to implement. Where soils have a sustained high acidity, the costs of using this approach can increase, sometimes to tens of thousands of dollars per acre. The challenge to find cost-effective reclamation approaches continues.

Promising reclamation options in the future may include using sludge, "biosolids," from municipal waste water treatment processes as an organic soil amendment, and growing plant species that are more tolerant of acidic conditions.
Soil Treatment
High levels of metals in soils, not just acidity, can be harmful to plants, animals, and, in some cases, people. A common approach used in dealing with contaminated soil is to move it to specially designed repositories. This approach can be very expensive and controversial, but it is sometimes required. With this approach, the volume and toxicity of the soil is not reduced, the soil is just relocated. Effective soil treatment approaches in the future depend upon better understanding of the risks associated with metals in mine wastes. These "natural" metals in minerals may not be as readily available in the biosphere, and therefore, they may not be as toxic as the metals in processed forms, such as lead in gasoline.

Future approaches may include:

Using chemical methods to stabilize metals in soils, making them less mobile and biologically available.

Using bacteriacides that stop the bacterial growth that promotes the oxidation of pyrite and the accompanying formation of sulfuric acid.

Using bioliners, such as low permeability and compacted manure, as barriers at the base of waste piles.

Permanently flooding waste materials containing pyrite to cut off the source of oxygen, stop the development of acidic conditions, and prevent mobilization of metals.

Water Treatment
The most common treatment for acidic and metal-bearing waters is the addition of a neutralizing material, such as lime, to reduce the acidity. This "active" treatment process, which causes the dissolved metals to precipitate from the water, usually requires the construction of a treatment facility. The ongoing maintenance that such a plant requires makes this treatment technique very expensive.

Aside from the expense, some active treatment plants generate large amounts of sludge. Disposal of the sludge is a major problem. Because of the cost and the physical challenges of dealing with sludge, alternatives to active treatment facilities are needed. Some possible alternatives include:

Using "passive" wetland systems to treat metal-bearing water. This approach has been successfully used where the volumes and acidity of the water are not too great. Passive wetland systems have the added advantage of creating desirable wildlife habitat.

Using in-situ treatment zones where reactive materials or electric currents are placed in the subsurface so that water passing through them would be treated.

Combining treatment with the recovery of useful materials from contaminated water.

Preventing Acid Rock Drainage
Although the discharge of acidic drainage presents several challenges to protecting water quality, the significance and widespread occurrence of acid rock drainage warrant special efforts to prevent or minimize its occurrence. Prevention must be addressed during exploration activities, before the beginning of newly-planned mining operations. In some cases, it may even be possible to prevent or reduce acid rock drainage in old or abandoned mining areas. Current and potential treatment approaches for acid rock drainage are similar to those already described. Possible measures to prevent or significantly reduce acid rock drainage include:

Flooding of old underground mine workings to cut off the oxygen supply necessary to the sustained generation of acidic waters.

Sealing exposed surfaces in underground workings with a coating of material that is non-reactive or impermeable to inhibit the oxidation process.

Backfilling mine workings with reactive materials that can neutralize and treat waters that pass through them.

Adding chemicals to the water in flooded surface and underground mine workings that can inhibit acid-generating chemical reactions and precipitate coatings that will seal off groundwater migration routes.

Isolating contaminated waters at depth by stratification, allowing viable habitat to develop near the surface in the water that fills large open pits.

Controlling Smelter Emissions
Smelter emissions, especially sulfur dioxide and particulate materials, have historically presented significant environmental problems. Modern smelting technology has met this challenge by drastically reducing the amount of emissions. An example is the modernized smelter built by Kennecott Utah Copper that processes ore concentrates from the Bingham Canyon Mine near Salt Lake City. Using technology developed by the Finnish company Outokumpu, this smelter has reduced sulfur dioxide emissions to 95 percent of previous permitted levels. This smelter, which came online in 1995, is the cleanest in the world. It captures 99.9 percent of the emitted sulfur.

Learn More

Metal Mining and the Environment (Booklet), American Geosciences Institute
Provides basic information about the mining cycle, from exploration for economic mineral deposits to mine closure. The booklet discusses the environmental aspects of metal mining and illustrates the ways science and technology assist in preventing or reducing environmental impacts.

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Can we mitigate environmental impacts from mining?

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Material adapted from: Hudson, T.L, Fox, F.D., and Plumlee, G.S. 1999. Metal Mining and the Environment, p. 11,41-46. Published by the American Geosciences Institute Environmental Awareness Series. Click here to download the full handbook. The major potential environmental impacts associated with mining and associated mineral processing operations are related to erosion-prone landscapes, soil and water quality, and air quality.

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Visual Aid: Significant Uptick in Mining Revenue Output

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Visual Aid: Significant Uptick in Mining Revenue Output

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This graph shows how the mining industry has been profiting more and more in the past years. This is partly because of the increased mining output, but also because of the increased demand for these minerals. This increase in profitability from mining production makes it more enticing for company leaders to increase mining production, making it probable that they will plan to increase production even more in the future.

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Was there anything strange about the topic?

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Was there anything strange about the topic?

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When researching this topic, I found it a bit strange that many governments were contradicting themselves. There has been a large push in recent years from governments to make companies implement cleaner processes throughout many industries. This has happened with the mining industry and there have been regulations set in place to make processes cleaner. However, the regulations do not seem to be mitigating the damage caused by these mines. People are still being affected by them. While governments seem to push greener processes, it doesn’t seem like they are doing nearly enough.

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This issue affects me significantly. I am only fourteen, and I am part of a generation this is growing into the adults of the future. However, the planet that my generation will eventually lead is being destroyed. My future is being affected because if things stay the way they are, I will not have a planet and will not have a future. My generation needs things to change because that is the only way to save our future and our planet.

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My hope for the future is that governments, companies, and people in general come together to find a solution to this problem. Mining presents numerous environmental and social issues that make this process not sustainable. I hope we are able to fix the problem and save our planet, but that can only happen if everyone comes to an agreement on how to solve it.

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Why was this even important or significant?

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Why was this even important or significant?

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This issue is important and significant because it affects everyone. Even though mining company executives only care about making more money, they don’t realize that they will suffer with everyone else when the world gets significantly affected by climate change. This is important because if we don’t solve this issue, life on earth could be greatly affected, which nobody wants. People don’t realize it, but we don’t have much time to change these processes and save the planet from significant harm.