Author: Helle Jeppesen/Marina Borisova
Editor: Andrey Brenner, http://www.dw-world.de
The price for gold is beating records and 1 kg gold costs around 37,000 Euros at the stock market. Expensive? Cheap! – environmentalists are convinced. One wedding ring “costs” tons of toxic wastes.
The by-product of raw material extraction to produce modest jewelry is 20 tons of toxic wastes. “Cyanide leaching is used to extract gold from ore concentrate,” explains Marie Müller, a researcher at Bonne International Center for Conversion.
Every year 182 tons of potassium cyanide is used for fold mining all over the world.
Highly Toxic Production
Late in January 2000 an environmental disaster occurred in Romanian Baia-Mare city. Because of dyke beach in the territory of the mine, the water saturated with cyanide got into the Tisza River, then into the Danube and the Black Sea. This led to the mass elimination of animal organisms in Romania, Hungary and Serbia.
The water in many reservoirs in the surroundings of Baia-Mare can’t be used for drinking even today. Romanian-Australian Aurul Company, which was the operator of that mine, declared about its bankruptcy. After four months, the company again proceeded to gold mining, but already under other name and in the other place. The mine in Baia-Mare took new operator – Transgold, but naturally it didn’t assume the consequences of the catastrophe.
Gold mining is concentrated in the hands of large international concerns, which develop the mines in the countries where environmental protection is not a priority. When the mining of nonferrous metals gets unprofitable, companies get closed and leave after them huge piles of wastes and seas of toxic slush with cyanide.
Professor Friedhelm Korte brings the following state of affairs. On average 250,000 tons of gold-bearing rock is crushed in the mine per year, which is evenly spread in the territory of 1,5 ha, then sprayed with 125 tons of cyanide solution and 365,000 cubic meters of water. Under the condition of extracting about three grams of gold per one ton of rock, this gives 750 kilos of gold. Many mines allow to min not more than one gram of precious metal from one tons of gold-bearing rock, nevertheless, wastes don’t get less.
“Besides wastes, there are tens of thousand tons of final tailings, which contain highly toxic compounds of heavy metals – lead, cadmium, copper, mercury and arsenic,” enumerates the specialist in environmental chemistry. Under him, hundreds of substances are washed as a result, which react with each other in an unknown manner for science. Taking into consideration economic and environmental costs, news about another record price for gold makes Professor Korte smile. “Price gold in international market is underestimated,” he thinks.
August 17, 2011 at 15:51