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Article: Tarnishing the earth: gold mining's dirty secret. (Focus).
- Article from:
- Environmental Health Perspectives
- Article date:
- October 1, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Gold mining may bring to mind images of grizzled prospectors prodding stubborn, overloaded burros or standing knee-deep in cold California steams, panning for nuggets. Modern gold milling, however, is a machine- and chemical-intensive endeavor in which hundreds of tons of rock are moved and processed for every ounce of gold extracted. "It's common now to talk about a one billion ton open-pit mine," says Glenn Miller, a professor of environmental and resource sciences at the University of Nevada at Reno.
According to the Worldwatch Institute, all mineral mining in Canada generates 650 million tons of waste per year. Miller estimates that each year gold milling ...