Southeast Alaska lawmakers are joining tribal and municipal governments, calling on the federal government to stop – at least temporarily – British Columbia’s mining activities in transboundary watersheds.
Southeast Alaska’s major river systems – the Taku, Unuk and Stikine – originate in British Columbia. Those transboundary watersheds are peppered with mineral claims, active mines and shuttered former mining operations.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/
Local Ktunaxa First Nation upset mining company seeking reduction to $16 million in penalties
A local First Nation says it’s “disappointed” Teck Coal is seeking to reduce the $16 million in fines it was assessed by the B.C. Ministry of Environment in January for polluting waterways in B.C.’s East Kootenay.
In January, the province imposed three administrative penalties on Teck Coal Limited, a subsidiary of Teck Resources, citing the company’s failure to have water treatment facilities ready by a required date. The company had been asked to have the facilities ready in order to limit emissions of nitrate and selenium from its Fording River operations in the Elk Valley.
In Indonesia, sickness and pollution plague a sprawling factory complex that supplies the world with crucial battery materials.
AFTER DAYBREAK, THE village of Labota begins to shudder with the roar of motorbikes. Thousands of riders in canary yellow helmets and dust-stained workwear pack its ramshackle, pothole-ridden main road, in places six or seven lanes wide, as it runs along the coast of Indonesia’s Banda Sea. The mass of traffic crawls toward the Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park, better known as IMIP, the world’s epicenter for nickel production.
“This is a tainted city,” says Sarida, a woman in her forties buying cough medicine at a roadside pharmacy. Only her eyes are visible; the rest wrapped in a face mask, hijab, and burqa. Behind her, a factory belches out brown plumes as thick as a skyscraper.
You, the smartphone addict. The modern nomad, lugging your fancy laptop. The electric car driver, smug in your certainty that you’re making the world a better place. Look over here, under this rock; look at what you’d rather not see.
That’s what Siddharth Kara invites you to do in his damning new book, “Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives.” Maybe you already know our booming battery-based economy depends on cobalt mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo. You’ve heard things are bad there. But I’d guess that, like me — smartphone addict, laptop lugger, owner of an electric car — you had no idea just how bad.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/
The company failed to treat effluent for selenium and nitrate, Ministry of Environment says
A Canadian mining company has been fined more than $16 million for polluting waterways in B.C.’s East Kootenay.
The B.C. Ministry of Environment has imposed three administrative penalties on Teck Coal Limited, a subsidiary of Teck Resources, citing the company’s failure to have water treatment facilities ready by a required date to limit emissions of nitrate and selenium from its Fording River operations in the Elk Valley.
The decline of the coal industry means 17 mines in the New South Wales Hunter Valley will close over the next two decades. More than 130,000 hectares of mining land — nearly two-thirds of the valley floor between Broke and Muswellbrook — will become available for new uses.
Restoring and reusing this land could contribute billions of dollars to the Hunter economy, create thousands of full-time jobs and make the region a world leader in industries such as renewable energy and regenerative agriculture that improves soil and water quality and increases biodiversity and resilience. But to unlock these future opportunities, we must first clean up the legacy of the past.
LONDON, Jan 27 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – In January 2019, a tailings dam from an iron ore mine burst near the southeast Brazilian town of Brumadinho, unleashing a deadly avalanche of muddy waste that killed an estimated 270 people.
The anniversary of the disaster – Jan. 25 – is a painful day for Angelica Amanda Andrade, whose sister Natalia died aged 32. “My life changed completely four years ago,” said Andrade, 28, a teacher who is campaigning for safer mining practices on behalf of her community.
Environmental advocates say costly cleanups of former non-renewable resource projects in the North show the need for better planning.
YELLOWKNIFE – Environmental advocates say costly cleanups of former non-renewable resource projects in the North show the need for better planning.
Three of Canada’s top five most expensive federal contaminated sites are abandoned mines in the North: Giant Mine in the Northwest Territories at an estimated $4.38 billion and the Faro and United Keno Hill mines in Yukon at $1 billion and $125 million, respectively.
https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/
In Baie Verte, N.L., a mine that once brought prosperity now symbolizes pain, suffering and death. Nobody knows how to get rid of it.
This is Part I of a three-part series on contaminated sites in Newfoundland and Labrador.
In Émile Zola’s 1885 novel Germinal, a French mining town, filled with families dependent on coal, is plotting a strike. It’s not an idyllic existence, living in 19th-century Montsou. Workers and their families sleep in shacks, eat mostly bread and rarely embrace leisure.
Eventually, they’re consumed by the massive beast whose tendrils reach deep underground. The mine, named Le Voreux, holds such sway over the townspeople’s lives that it transforms into a character in itself; figuratively speaking, by the end of the book, it eats its servants alive.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/
With a cost estimate of $4.38-billion, remediation of the Giant Mine, one of the most contaminated sites in Canada, is also expected to be the most expensive federal environmental cleanup in the country’s history.
The figure, recently approved by the Treasury Board of Canada, spans costs from 2005 until 2038, when active remediation at the former Yellowknife gold mine is anticipated to end. That includes $710-million the federal government said has already been spent, but does not include costs for long-term care and maintenance.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/
Quantifying, in dollar terms, the effect of the mine on the economy, environment and people is complicated
Last week, the federal government revealed that cleaning up Yellowknife’s Giant Mine is now projected to cost $4.38 billion instead of $1 billion. This is, by one measure, greater than the mine’s total estimated revenues during its operation.
Quantifying, in dollar terms, the impact of the mine on the local economy, the environment, and the people who live on and use the area’s land and water is complicated, if not impossible.
Phoenix Tailings uses new technology to get key minerals out of mining waste.
Digging up and extracting the minerals needed to make electric car batteries or wind turbines comes at an environmental cost, using huge amounts of energy and dangerous chemicals and creating toxic pollution. But one Boston-area startup is getting some key materials in a different way: Instead of mining them from the ground, it uses new technology to extract them from mining waste.
“For us, it’s about figuring out how can we extract the most from the waste that has already been mined,” says Anthony Balladon, cofounder and VP of partnerships at the startup, Phoenix Tailings. “It has already been dug out of the ground. How can we make the most of what we’ve already done, rather than dig up new holes somewhere else?”
An international team of researchers is proposing the idea of using aluminum formate – a metal-organic framework (MOF) – to remove carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants’ exhaust before the greenhouse gas reaches the atmosphere.
In a paper published in the journal Science Advances, the research group explains that MOFs have exhibited great potential for filtering and separating organic materials—often the various hydrocarbons in fossil fuels—from one another.
Miles Hatfield was walking into his dining room when he felt the wooden floor give way. His legs dropped hip-deep into water that had pooled under the brick house in the green hills of eastern Kentucky where he had lived for the past 40 years, trapping him in his own floor.
Hatfield, a retired coal miner, raised two boys in the house a few miles from the West Virginia border and added on five rooms as his family grew. But the red water running off from the nearby Love Branch coal mine had turned his backyard into a marsh, ruined his septic system, and finally sucked him through his floor three years ago.
https://www.thompsoncitizen.net/
In the North, some mines risk leaking acid if the permafrost melts, while across Canada heavier rainfall will add strain to tailings dams and a lack of it could throw operations.
While no strangers to extreme weather, the growing risks from climate change are forcing the mining industry to take a hard look at their methods, and how to prepare for the worst. Many of the most prudent actions to minimize risk are, however, also more costly, meaning that while some have taken them on, not everyone has followed suit.
