It is the price paid for the precious gold

"How mercury poisons gold miners and enters the food chain"

by

Linda Pressly

September 17th, 2013

BBC NEWS

About 15% of the world's gold is produced by artisanal and small-scale miners, most of whom use mercury to extract it from the earth. In Indonesia, the industry supports some three million people - but the miners risk poisoning themselves, their children and the land.

Fahrul Raji, a man in his early 30s, is not feeling well. At the health centre in Kereng Pangi, a town in Central Kalimantan surrounded by goldfields, he explains his symptoms.

"I often have a headache, and I am weak. I have a bitter taste in my mouth."

According to Dr Stephan Bose-O'Reilly, who is examining him, Fahrul is being slowly poisoned by mercury.

"Fahrul's been working with mercury for many years, and he's showing the typical symptoms of mercury intoxication," says Bose-O'Reilly, a German medic who began studying the impact of mercury on Indonesians' health a decade ago. "He also has a tremor and a co-ordination problem."

Although mercury use in small-scale gold mining in Indonesia is illegal, miners still use it to extract gold from the rock or soil.

Fahrul isn't a miner, but he has a gold shop in Kereng Pangi. Every day miners bring him the fruits of their labour - usually a pea-sized piece of amalgam that is mercury mixed with gold.

Fahrul burns it, and the mercury evaporates leaving the gold behind. But the fumes are highly toxic, which is why smelters like Fahrul often show more severe signs of mercury poisoning than miners who use it in the field.

"Mercury is a neuro-toxin," Bose-O'Reilly explains. "It affects the cerebellum, which is the part of the brain that helps you move properly, and co-ordinate your movements. Mercury also harms the kidneys and other organs, but the neurological damage it does is irreversible."

Fahrul's gold shop is on the main street of Kereng Pangi. He sits behind a wooden counter, his blow torch behind him, waiting for business. At the end of the day, the miners arrive with their pieces of amalgam ready for smelting. Fahrul says he's worried about the impact of mercury on his health, but he has no intention of changing his job.

"This is a family business that's been handed down to me. My father was also a gold buyer. And he's about 65 now, and still looks healthy."

Even though he has symptoms, Fahrul has convinced himself that the risk he runs is small. And that is the problem with mercury - its effects are not dramatic enough, in the short term, to act as a viable deterrent.

The worst case of mass mercury poisoning the world has ever seen happened in Japan in the first half of the 20th Century.

Symptoms appeared only gradually in the fishing village of Minamata. At first, nobody could explain why people began to slur their speech, or stumbled when they walked. They would have trouble swallowing, or tremble uncontrollably. Children were born with disabilities. Thousands would die with what became known as Minamata Disease.

But it took 30 years - until the 1960s - to identify the cause of the suffering: a local plastics factory that was dumping mercury into the bay. The mercury was contaminating fish, the staple food of the local population.

If Fahrul continues to smelt mercury in his gold shop, and inhale the poisonous fumes, it is likely his symptoms will get worse. Bose-O'Reilly says his urine contains 697 micrograms of mercury per litre - far more than usual.

"This is incredibly high," he says. "Most people would have one or two micrograms at most."

There are an estimated 10-15 million unregulated gold miners around the world, operating in 70 countries. Artisanal small-scale gold mining (ASGM) is the largest source of mercury pollution in the world after the burning of fossil fuels.

And in Central Kalimantan the effects of this unregulated industry on the environment have been devastating. Around Kereng Pangi, the miners have cleared virgin forest once home to orang-utans and hornbills. What is left is a lunar-like landscape, its pools polluted with mercury.

"There are 60,000 hectares of denuded area that are completely pitted like this," explains Sumali Agrawal the technical director of YTS, a local NGO working to mitigate the impact of mercury.

"You can see it on Google Earth - a white patch in the middle of a green landscape. This was formerly tropical rainforest on a sand substrate. If you left it alone for 50 years, some vegetation would grow, but there would never be a diverse rainforest here again."

There are no large nuggets of gold to be mined around Kereng Pangi - only tiny particles of the precious metal are present in the tons of earth. Miners use mechanical sluices to trap the mud that is rich in gold. They mix this with mercury in buckets using their bare hands.

Mercury is a persistent pollutant - it does not break down in the environment.

On the Indonesian island of Lombok, its potential for harm is multiplied because it is being used in conjunction with cyanide.

"Together mercury and cyanide create double the problem in the environment," says Dr Dewi Krisnayanti, a soil scientist specialising in heavy metals at Lombok's Mataram University.

Cyanide helps to dissolve the mercury, and when the waste is spilled into paddy fields it binds with organic molecules in the environment, becoming methyl mercury. This is far more toxic - in Minamata it was methyl mercury that poisoned thousands of people.

Dewi has analysed samples of rice seeds and leaves from the paddy fields in the south-west of the island.

"The concentration of methyl mercury was the highest ever recorded in a laboratory - 115 parts per billion," she says. "I felt very sad when I saw the data, because methyl mercury can be absorbed by plants, get into the food chain and affect human health."

The same methods are used to recover gold in other Asian countries too, and these are also rice-eating nations. If the contamination of paddy fields was found to be widespread, it could be devastating.

Indonesian's Assistant Deputy Minister of the Environment, Halimah Syafrul, says controls on illegal imports of mercury are being tightened. And the government hopes the forthcoming ratification of the UN treaty on mercury - known as the Minamata Convention - will bring international assistance to help Indonesia's miners find alternatives to the use of mercury.

"There is pollution in the environment, pollution in the rivers, destruction in the mountainous areas and destruction of our protected forests. It's a similar situation in almost every province and we have 34 provinces in Indonesia," says Halimah, an environmental scientist by training.

Dr Rachmadi Purwana, professor of Public Health at the University of Indonesia is worried.

"The threat is there every day and it is escalating. We have to remember that in Japan a small place like Minamata shattered the whole world by revealing Minamata disease. In Indonesia, it's not only in one village, it's throughout the country. In nearly every province, there is small-scale gold mining."

And what is Rachmadi's fear if there is no action?

"A national disaster."

Minamata disease [Wikipedia]

The price paid for a precious mineral

Decades of mining and now safety is an issue...not enough and too late. But that is Africa. Gold and other precious minerals are scattered throughout the world. Will the same concern be manifested at other mining and smelting sites? I doubt it.

"South Africa Is Aiming to Ease Dangers of Digging for Gold"

by

Barry Bearak

November 21st, 2008

The New York Times

The easy pickings are long gone. The remaining gold is buried in slender seams two and three miles down, tiny but precious particles flecked within the subterranean reefs of unyielding rock.

Each day, the miners crowd into the open-cage elevators, descending into the earth at a depth greater than that of the Grand Canyon, then boarding the small trains that carry them through the lattice of tunnels. It can take 90 minutes just to reach the high-powered drills at the next pocket of unclaimed ore.

That far down, heat floats off the rock at about 110 degrees, a temperature made tolerable only by refrigerated air blown through the passageways. The drilling is done in narrow, low-roofed clefts that have been gouged out of the gold-bearing reef. Explosives are then wedged into each hole. Entombment is the biggest danger under the weight of falling rock.

The value of the extracted gold is measured in currency, but of course there is a human toll as well — fatalities that, while declining, continue to be appalling enough that Parliament has been considering a measure this week that threatens company executives with prison time for deaths within their mines.

A 1995 national commission estimated that 69,000 mineworkers were killed in South Africa between 1900 and 1993, with 25 times that many seriously injured, the vast majority digging for gold. That does not count the untold numbers felled by lung diseases owing to the contaminated air — or those rendered deaf by the bone-jolting noise.

The rate of mining fatalities compares "unfavorably with most other countries in the world," the commission concluded. Since then, safety measures have reduced the annual number of deaths to about 220 from an average of 742. This is post-apartheid South Africa, and the welfare of miners — nearly all of them black — is a matter of more scrupulous concern.

"We've had pockets of amazing improvements, but people continue to work in conditions that are patently unsafe," said Prof. Mavis Hermanus, the director of a center on mining at the University of Witswatersrand.

The new legislation would subject company executives to prison for up to five years or fines of up to $300,000 — making administrators sitting in offices criminally culpable for accidents in the dank underground.

"We've campaigned for these penalties for a long time," said Lesiba Seshoka, a spokesman for the National Union of Mineworkers, which represents a majority of the nation's 465,000 miners. "The companies pay lip service to safety and go on being negligent. They blast before putting up the proper supports. Imagine what remains of a man after the ceiling of rock has fallen on him. Sometimes you have nothing left to put in a grave."

But most of the major mining companies say they have already become far more conscientious about safety. Randel Rademann, general manager at Mponeng, one of the biggest mines, said he opposed the legislation. "We all need to work together on safety and not against each other with threats," he said. "If they make laws too onerous, skilled people will leave the industry."

Mponeng, 30 miles southeast of here, is owned by the international giant AngloGold Ashanti. At 11,355 feet, the mine is the second deepest in the world, and the excavation there will soon put it in first place, Mr. Rademann said. Depth matters. The danger of a rock fall, a cave-in caused by unsecured weight, or a rock burst, a violent fracture caused by built-up stress, gets greater as the mining goes deeper.

But only one man has died at Mponeng this year, trapped between two cars of a train. A sign at the mine’s entrance proclaims, "Health and safety is our first value." Beside it is a running count of fatality-free worker shifts. Managers nimbly insert that catchphrase — safety is our first value — into conversation. Even miners, their faces lacquered with sweat, recite the words like corporate liturgy.

"Safety is the big value," said Hendrik Marubane, 25, a driller’s assistant working in one of those narrow clefts. As he moved his head, the light affixed to his hard hat became a dancing beam against the dark rock.

Mr. Marubane was too tall to stand in so low a cavity and moved with a waddle. "I used to be a policeman," he said. "I think this work is safer."

Johannesburg owes its existence to the mines. The city did not so much grow as erupt in the late 19th century beside newly discovered gold fields. Men with pickaxes and pans were never going to reap the wealth below. The geology required international syndicates with enough capital to invade the rock. Johannesburg became a financial hub.

Most of the world's gold once came from South Africa, but in recent decades international production has increased while this country's yield has declined. Last year, South Africa produced only 11.1 percent of the world's gold, and China nudged ahead of it.

Nevertheless, mining still accounts for nearly 7 percent of the nation's gross domestic product and is a vital source of jobs in a country where unemployment is estimated at nearly 40 percent. Further mechanization of the mines might well reduce the number of accidents, but it would also lower the supply of jobs. Unions oppose it. "We represent people, not machines," Mr. Seshoka of the mineworkers union said flatly. "There are other ways to make the mines safer."

At Mponeng, Mr. Rademann, the general manager, said the company already was doing about as much as it could. He said 96 percent of injuries happened because a worker did something wrong. "It's just like being on the road," where most car accidents are caused by driver negligence, he said.

Lungile Mnini, 47, who works in the mine's canteen, said he could not recall doing anything wrong when the rocks fell on him in 1991. He remembered only a tremor and then other miners scooping him free. Seven men died. He spent three years in a wheelchair. "I'm glad I don't go down there anymore," he said.

The conversation was taking place at a hostel for the miners. A woman named Thuli Mahlalela, a 33-year-old single parent, joined in. "It's nice to work underground," she said. "You get away from the things bothering you above ground."

Six months ago, she got a job helping transport timber through Mponeng's subterranean arteries. The job is O.K., she said, but the money is even better, about 3,000 rand per month, or $300.

"Try being a woman and get a better job," she said.

As for danger, it did not really worry her.

"Safety," she remarked, "is our first value."