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"They’ve taken our land and our
grandparents land. They ruined the mountains.We can’t drink our water anymore." —Leader of the Amungme people, on Indonesia’s
Grasberg gold mine, the world’s biggest |
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OUR ELECTRIC WIRE NEEDS COPPER WHICH COMES FROM COPPER MINES
AND IT IS POLLUTING ALL
WATER SOURCES |
Copper mines pollute
water bodies steadily over a large period of time. While copper tailings (residue left
after mining) is one problem in India, other countries have had devastating consequences
with regard to copper mining.
The Clark Fork River basin in this US state of Montana
has seen more than 100 years of mining and smelting including the largest copper open pit
mine in the world. This pit and its network now has 40 billion litres of acid mine water
that rises a little each year, threatening water bodies, which are already contaminated.
Arsenic, lead, zinc, cadmium from the copper mine have
touched drinking water aquifers and soils are contaminated with smelter emissions. Local
environmental groups have estimated that cleaning up operations would cost in excess of $1
OUR PHOTOGRAPHS
NEED CHROMIUM WHICH COMES FROM SUKINDA
MINES
AND IT IS CREATING A HEALTH
HAZARD
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billion.
The Papua New Guniea copper mine of Ok Tedi has resulted
in immense water pollution. Australian company BHP has been dumping mine waste into Ok
Tedi and Fly rivers for years now and even cleaning their transport vessels in it. The
result? The rivers are permanently yellow or grey. Trees along the bank are dead. The
rivers, are becoming shallower and wider resulting in floods.
Photographs need chromates for pigmentation, which
are made out of chromium.
These chromite mines in Orissa are leading to
environmental pollution. Due to the mines, chromium is seeping into rivers. The
contaminated water has been linked to skin diseases, respiratory disorders and even lung
cancer. The affected people of that area are demanding nothing short of the complete
closure of the mines.
| concrete pole requires 135 tonnes of
raw material. Replacing concrete with steel would bring down the raw material requirement
to less than half — 60 tonnes.  CRADLE TO GRAVE APPROACH: A product
has to be accounted for from manufacture to disposal. For example if a Japanese has to
throw his TV, he has to legally hand it over to his retailer and pay the recycling cost,
the retailer has to pass it on to the manufacturer, who has to dismantle and recycle it
ecologically.
FACTOR 10
CLUB: This group feels that we can bring down our intensity of resource consumption by a
factor of 10 (down to one-tenth of the current value) in the next few decades (see cover,
page 70-71).
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