5
With This Ring
Gold mining today resembles dismembering mountains more than panning
for nuggets; most mines never unearth a single visible flake. Instead
they crush vast amounts of rock, pile it up, and leach out the gold
molecules with cyanide.
Mining gold to create a single 1/3-ounce 18-karat ring produces at Those emissions contain 5.5 pounds of lead, 3 pounds of arsenic, almost
least 20 tons of waste and 13 pounds of toxic emissions.
a ounces of mercury, and I ounce of cyanide.
Across the globe, Newmont crushed and disposed of more than 700 million
tons of rock in 2004.
In 2005, Route 766 in Nevada was partially buried by an avalanche
involving 10 million tons of waste from a Newmont mine. In Romania,
more than 100,000 tons of toxic waste spilled from the Aurul gold mine
in 2000, contaminating the drinking water of 2.5 million people and
killing at least 1200 tons offish.
In 2002, the Bush administration changed regulations to allow mine and
other industrial waste to be clumped in waterways.
The world's top gold producers (in descending order): South Africa, the
U.S., China, Australia, Peru.
Top consumers: India, China, Turkey, Italy, the U.S.
According to the No Dirty Gold campaign, which signs up jewelers to
demand better mining practices, the only way to buy "clean" gold is to
opt for vintage or recycled jewelry.--Neha Inamdar
