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Cyanide and scrap metal
Published: Friday | July 22, 2011
One of the signs posted at the Pennants gold-mining site warning persons not to approach the danger zone. - Photo by Christopher Serju
Sometime in 2001, my wife and I and a few environmentally conscious friends attended the public meeting at Main Ridge near Pennants, Clarendon, called to publicise the impending gold-mining operation to begin there. The officials from AusJam Mining explained to the audience the process by which the gold would be extracted: gold-bearing rocks would be ground into powder and heaped in a pile on a slope; a solution of sodium cyanide would then be poured over the crushed ore; the gold (and silver and other heavy metals) would dissolve (as gold cyanide and/or silver cyanide solution, etc.) and flow down the slope where it would be collected, leaving the inert rock behind. The gold (and silver, etc.) would be precipitated, and the cyanide solution recovered and reused.
Cyanide is one of the most deadly poisons known to science. It makes cells unable to use oxygen, and death takes place in minutes. Gold mining using cyanide is dangerous business, and this process is banned in many (sensible) gold-producing countries. There are safer ways to extract gold.
In December 2000, just a few months prior to this public meeting, an accident had occurred at the Omai Gold Mine in Guyana. A cyanide solution containing toxic heavy metals was discharged into the Omai River, a tributary of the Essequibo River, a major source of water for drinking, cooking, bathing, livestock and agriculture for locals. The government declared a national disaster, as hundreds of fish were killed. There had also been a spill at Omai five years earlier (August 1995).
At the Main Ridge meeting, I asked the AusJam officials what would be done to ensure that no cyanide was released into the nearby Rio Minho, Jamaica's longest river, which passed through dozens of residential and farming communities downstream of the mine. We were assured that the cyanide solution would be securely stored, and that in the unlikely event any should escape accidentally, all they had to do was add acid, and the cyanide in solution would be converted into cyanide gas, which the breeze would blow away.
I was not impressed.
Environmentally careless gov't
The notoriously environmentally careless government of the day approved the use of cyanide in Main Ridge, and collected their taxes from the gold mining. When the mining operation shut down after industrial unrest and fallout from the Kraal incident, was it not the responsibility of Natural Resources Conservation Authority (NRCA) and National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) - knowing the deadliness of cyanide - to ensure that the site was sanitised?
This failure seems to be utter carelessness, even if it is not surprising. The inefficiencies of NEPA and the NRCA are never far from our consciousness. I wonder if the owners of the dead cows have a cause of action against the Government? In addition to the cow-replacement costs, they should explore damages for aggravation, as well as exemplary damages. It is one thing to be enslaved to business interests, but it is quite another to put the public in danger in the process.
It's a good thing to rid the landscape of solid waste, especially old iron, car batteries and dead computers. Once opportunists discovered that trash could be converted into cash, there was a rush of all and sundry into the scrap-business.
But it must have been obvious to a blind, deaf and dumb man that once the decades-old stuff lying around had been collected and exported, the business was going to grind to a halt. From year to year, the Jamaican private and public sectors just don't generate that much new scrap metal. But with a scrap-metal industry hungry to export, they would take metal from wherever they could get it: railway lines, manhole covers, bridges, power and telecommunications cables, water pipes, and even working farm vehicles.
The sheer size of the Jamaican scrap-metal industry is unsustainable. For it to continue to operate at initial levels, it must cannibalise from the productive sector and from private homes.
A government committed to sustainable development would commission an assessment of the volume of scrap metal generated annually, and would ensure that the size of the sector matched the supply. But the scrap-metal sector might make campaign contributions too, and the Government and party are hostage to the business sector; so far, they have been able to escape more than cosmetic regulation.
We, the people, continue to suffer from the lack of transparency in political donations.
Peter Espeut is a chemist and an environmentalist. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.
Published: Friday | July 22, 2011
One of the signs posted at the Pennants gold-mining site warning persons not to approach the danger zone. - Photo by Christopher Serju
Sometime in 2001, my wife and I and a few environmentally conscious friends attended the public meeting at Main Ridge near Pennants, Clarendon, called to publicise the impending gold-mining operation to begin there. The officials from AusJam Mining explained to the audience the process by which the gold would be extracted: gold-bearing rocks would be ground into powder and heaped in a pile on a slope; a solution of sodium cyanide would then be poured over the crushed ore; the gold (and silver and other heavy metals) would dissolve (as gold cyanide and/or silver cyanide solution, etc.) and flow down the slope where it would be collected, leaving the inert rock behind. The gold (and silver, etc.) would be precipitated, and the cyanide solution recovered and reused.
Cyanide is one of the most deadly poisons known to science. It makes cells unable to use oxygen, and death takes place in minutes. Gold mining using cyanide is dangerous business, and this process is banned in many (sensible) gold-producing countries. There are safer ways to extract gold.
In December 2000, just a few months prior to this public meeting, an accident had occurred at the Omai Gold Mine in Guyana. A cyanide solution containing toxic heavy metals was discharged into the Omai River, a tributary of the Essequibo River, a major source of water for drinking, cooking, bathing, livestock and agriculture for locals. The government declared a national disaster, as hundreds of fish were killed. There had also been a spill at Omai five years earlier (August 1995).
At the Main Ridge meeting, I asked the AusJam officials what would be done to ensure that no cyanide was released into the nearby Rio Minho, Jamaica's longest river, which passed through dozens of residential and farming communities downstream of the mine. We were assured that the cyanide solution would be securely stored, and that in the unlikely event any should escape accidentally, all they had to do was add acid, and the cyanide in solution would be converted into cyanide gas, which the breeze would blow away.
I was not impressed.
Environmentally careless gov't
The notoriously environmentally careless government of the day approved the use of cyanide in Main Ridge, and collected their taxes from the gold mining. When the mining operation shut down after industrial unrest and fallout from the Kraal incident, was it not the responsibility of Natural Resources Conservation Authority (NRCA) and National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) - knowing the deadliness of cyanide - to ensure that the site was sanitised?
This failure seems to be utter carelessness, even if it is not surprising. The inefficiencies of NEPA and the NRCA are never far from our consciousness. I wonder if the owners of the dead cows have a cause of action against the Government? In addition to the cow-replacement costs, they should explore damages for aggravation, as well as exemplary damages. It is one thing to be enslaved to business interests, but it is quite another to put the public in danger in the process.
It's a good thing to rid the landscape of solid waste, especially old iron, car batteries and dead computers. Once opportunists discovered that trash could be converted into cash, there was a rush of all and sundry into the scrap-business.
But it must have been obvious to a blind, deaf and dumb man that once the decades-old stuff lying around had been collected and exported, the business was going to grind to a halt. From year to year, the Jamaican private and public sectors just don't generate that much new scrap metal. But with a scrap-metal industry hungry to export, they would take metal from wherever they could get it: railway lines, manhole covers, bridges, power and telecommunications cables, water pipes, and even working farm vehicles.
The sheer size of the Jamaican scrap-metal industry is unsustainable. For it to continue to operate at initial levels, it must cannibalise from the productive sector and from private homes.
A government committed to sustainable development would commission an assessment of the volume of scrap metal generated annually, and would ensure that the size of the sector matched the supply. But the scrap-metal sector might make campaign contributions too, and the Government and party are hostage to the business sector; so far, they have been able to escape more than cosmetic regulation.
We, the people, continue to suffer from the lack of transparency in political donations.
Peter Espeut is a chemist and an environmentalist. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.