There are two ways to get metal.
Bangladeshi Workers Risk Lives Recycling Ships... thanks to Adam Minter for the nod.
One is to get it out of the ground. Here is an example: The OK Tedi Copper Mine on the island of Borneo. Metal is found in many places, but it's impossible to gouge and dump cyanide tailings anywhere close to a populated area. The USA has vast federal lands, remote from cities, so we can still mine red and hard rock metals (gold, copper, silver, etc.). They generate 45% of all toxics generated by all USA industry... but it's not close to property values. It's the same economic logic discussed in "environmental justice" blogs last weekend.
Australia has a lot of remote places, and is in the metal mining business, as is Canada and Mexico. But when you try to do it in a place like Europe, there are risks of toxic spill disasters, like this one in Eastern Europe in 2010, or recently, in Liuzhou, China. A city of 3.2 million, its drinking water system nuked by a cadmium spill into the Longjiang River, released by the Guangxi metal mining industry.
The press does occasionally cover these polluting practices, but only when an "abnormal" disaster strikes. Bloomberg reports in 2010, China's Shenzhen Zhongjin Shuts Zinc, Lead Smelter After Toxic Leak Found. Or here is another zinc smelting spill, of cadmium from metal mining, of the Yangtze River.
There are two ways to get metal.
Bangladeshi Workers Risk Lives Recycling Ships... thanks to Adam Minter for the nod.
One is to get it out of the ground. Here is an example: The OK Tedi Copper Mine on the island of Borneo. Metal is found in many places, but it's impossible to gouge and dump cyanide tailings anywhere close to a populated area. The USA has vast federal lands, remote from cities, so we can still mine red and hard rock metals (gold, copper, silver, etc.). They generate 45% of all toxics generated by all USA industry... but it's not close to property values. It's the same economic logic discussed in "environmental justice" blogs last weekend.
Australia has a lot of remote places, and is in the metal mining business, as is Canada and Mexico. But when you try to do it in a place like Europe, there are risks of toxic spill disasters, like this one in Eastern Europe in 2010, or recently, in Liuzhou, China. A city of 3.2 million, its drinking water system nuked by a cadmium spill into the Longjiang River, released by the Guangxi metal mining industry.
The press does occasionally cover these polluting practices, but only when an "abnormal" disaster strikes. Bloomberg reports in 2010, China's Shenzhen Zhongjin Shuts Zinc, Lead Smelter After Toxic Leak Found. Or here is another zinc smelting spill, of cadmium from metal mining, of the Yangtze River.
I've previously reported stories from the Danube, and from Guangzhou's massive zinc-lead smelter spill in 2006. And don't forget about the conflict metal mining... today, this blog is sadly the top of the google ranking if you are looking for news about it. I find that tragic. I'm a nobody. But the Guardian writes about stopping ship recycling, without asking, anywhere in the article, where the metal will be replaced from as the shipping industry increasingly sinks the ships rather than risk the wrath of environmentalists.In January 2012, Jonathan Watts wrote in The Guardian: Chinese emergency personnel are erecting barrages and pouring hundreds of tonnes of chloride into a river in southern China in a desperate effort to prevent a toxic spill from contaminating the supplies of a major city. The flow of cadmium - discharged into the Liu River earlier this month - has continued despite three previous containment operations, and now threatens the 3.2 million residents of Liuzhou city in Guangxi province. [Source: Jonathan Watts, The Guardian, January 30, 2012]
There are two ways to get metal.
