Toxic and radioactive: The damage from mining rare elements
Low wages, water shortage and acidified landscapes: Mining critical raw materials endangers human rights and the environment. Yet the industry is expanding.
The mining of critical raw materials leaves hostile rubble dumps in its wake.
More than every second person in the world now has a cellphone, and manufacturers are rolling out bigger, better, slicker models all the time. Many, however, have a bloody history.
Though made in large part of plastic, glass, ceramics, gold and copper, they also contain critical resources. The gallium used for LEDs and the camera flash, the tantalum in capacitors and indium that powers the display were all pulled from the ground at a price for nature and people.
FEATURE-Family men or forest destroyers? Meet the miners living off the Amazon s gold Reuters 1/21/2021
By Lucas Landau and Fabio Teixeira
ITAITUBA, Brazil, Jan 21 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - One man working deep in Brazil s Amazon said he knows how to stop the illegal logging, gold mining, deforestation and fires plaguing the region: let President Jair Bolsonaro carry out his plans to develop the rainforest. If people listen to him and believe in his ideas . many of the environmental issues would improve here in the Amazon, said the 53-year-old wildcat miner, who asked to be identified only by his nickname, Grande.
Grande s views are in direct opposition to those of leaders and environmentalists all over the world, who point to Bolsonaro s call to open up the Amazon to mining and agriculture as a driving force behind the rainforest s rampant destruction.
Alemão, a wildcat miner in Brazil’s Amazon, sifts through excavated rock for gold in a protected reserve in Para state, August 20, 2020. Image: Thomson Reuters Foundation/Lucas Landau
One man working deep in Brazil’s Amazon said he knows how to stop the illegal logging, gold mining, deforestation and fires plaguing the region: let President Jair Bolsonaro carry out his plans to develop the rainforest.
“If people listen to him and believe in his ideas … many of the environmental issues would improve here in the Amazon,” said the 53-year-old wildcat miner, who asked to be identified only by his nickname, Grande.