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Mining and Its Impact on the Environment Essay

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Introduction

Effects of mining on the environment, copper mining, reference list.

Mining is an economic activity capable of supporting the developmental goals of countries and societies. It also ensures that different metals, petroleum, and coal are available to different consumers or companies. Unfortunately, this practice entails excavation or substantial interference of the natural environment. The negative impacts of mining can be recorded at the global, regional, and local levels. A proper understanding of such implications can make it possible for policymakers and corporations to implement appropriate measures. The purpose of this paper is to describe and discuss the effects of mining on the environment.

Ways Mining Impact on the Environment

Miners use different methods to extract various compounds depending on where they are found. The first common procedure is open cast, whereby people scrap away rocks and other materials on the earth’s surface to expose the targeted products. The second method is underground mining, and it allows workers to get deeper materials and deposits. Both procedures are subdivided further depending on the nature of the targeted minerals and the available resources (Minerals Council of Australia 2019). Despite their striking differences in procedures, the common denominator is that they both tend to have negative impacts on the natural environment.

Firstly, surface mining usually requires that machines and individuals clear forests and vegetation cover. This means that the integrity of the natural land will be obliterated within a short period. Permanent scars will always be left due to this kind of mining. Secondly, the affected land will be exposed to the problem of soil erosion because the topmost soil is loosened. This problem results in flooding, contamination of the following water in rivers, and sedimentation of dams. Thirdly, any form of mining is capable of causing both noise and air pollution (Minerals Council of Australia 2019). The use of heavy machines and blasts explains why this is the case.

Fourthly, other forms of mining result in increased volumes of rocks and soil that are brought to the earth’s surface. Some of them tend to be toxic and capable of polluting water and air. Fifthly, underground mines tend to result in subsidence after collapsing. This means that forests and other materials covering the earth’s surface will be affected. Sixthly, different firms of mining are known to reduce the natural water table. For example, around 500,000,000 cubic meters of water tend to be pumped out of underground mines in Germany annually (Mensah et al., 2015). This is also the same case in other countries across the globe. Seventhly, different mining activities have been observed to produce dangerous greenhouse gases that continue to trigger new problems, including climate change and global warming.

Remediating Mine Sites

The problem of mining by the fact that many people or companies will tend to abandon their sites after the existing minerals are depleted. This malpractice is usually common since it is costly to clean up such areas and minimize their negative impacts on the natural environment. The first strategy for remediating mine sites is that of reclamation. This method entails the removal of both environmental and physical hazards in the region (Motoori, McLellan & Tezuka 2018). This will then be followed by planting diverse plant species. The second approach is the installation of soil cover. When pursuing this method, participants and companies should mimic the original natural setting and consider the drainage patterns. They can also consider the possible or expected land reuse choices.

The third remediation strategy for mine sites entails the use of treatment systems. This method is essential when the identified area is contaminated with metals and acidic materials that pose significant health risks to human beings and aquatic life (Mensah et al., 2015). Those involved can consider the need to construct dams and contain such water. Finally, mining companies can implement powerful cleanup processes and reuse or restore the affected sites. The ultimate objective is to ensure that every ugly site is improved and designed in such a way that it reduces its potential implications on the natural environment. From this analysis, it is evident that the nature of the mining method, the topography of the site, and the anticipated future uses of the region can inform the most appropriate remediation approach. Additionally, the selected method should address the negative impacts on the environment and promote sustainability.

Lessening Impact

Mining is a common practice that continues to meet the demands of the current global economy. With its negative implications, companies and other key stakeholders can identify various initiatives that will minimize every anticipated negative impact. Motoori, McLellan, and Tezuka (2018) encourage mining corporations to diversify their models and consider the importance of recycling existing materials or metals. This approach is sustainable and capable of reducing the dangers of mining. Governments can also formulate and implement powerful policies that compel different companies to engage in desirable practices, minimize pollution, and reduce noise pollution. Such guidelines will make sure that every company remains responsible for remediating their sites. Mensah et al. 2015) also support the introduction of laws that compel organizations to conduct environmental impact assessment analyses before starting their activities. This model will encourage them to identify regions or sites that will have minimal effects on the surrounding population or aquatic life. The concept of green mining has emerged as a powerful technology that is capable of lessening the negative implications of mining. This means that all activities will be sustainable and eventually meet the diverse needs of all stakeholders, including community members. Finally, new laws are essential to compelling companies to shut down and reclaim sites that are no longer in use.

Extraction from the Ore Body

Copper mining is a complex process since it is found in more stable forms, such as oxide and sulfide ores. These elements are obtained after the overburden has been removed. Corporations complete a 3-step process or procedure before obtaining pure copper. This is usually called ore concentration, and it follows these stages: froth flotation, roasting, and leaching (Sikamo, Mwanza & Mweemba 201). During froth flotation, sulfide ores are crushed to form small particles and then mixed with large quantities of water. Ionic collectors are introduced to ensure that CuS becomes hydrophobic in nature. The introduction of frothing agent results in the agitation and aeration of the slurry (Sikamo, Mwanza & Mweemba 2016). This means that the ore containing copper will float to the surface. All tailings will sink to the bottom of the solution. The refined material can then be skimmed and removed.

The next stage is that of roasting, whereby the collected copper is baked. The purpose of this activity is to minimize the quantities of sulfur. Such a procedure results in sulfur dioxide, As, and Sb (Yaras & Arslanoglu 2017). This leaves a fine mixture of copper and other impurities. The next phase of the ore concentration method is that of leaching. Different Compounds are used to solubilize the compound, such as H2SO4 and HCI. The leachate will then be deposited at the bottom and purified.

Smelting is the second stage that experts use to remove copper from its original ore. This approach produces iron and copper sulfides. Exothermic processes are completed to remove SiO2 and FeSiO3 slag (Yaras & Arslanoglu 2017). According to this equation, oxygen is introduced to produce pure copper and sulfur dioxide:

CuO + CuS = Cu(s) + SO2

The final phase is called refinement. The collected Cu is used as anodes and cathodes, whereby they are immersed in H2SO4 and CuSO4. During this process, copper will be deposited on the cathode while the anode will dissolve in the compound. All impurities will settle at the bottom (Sikamo, Mwanza & Mweemba 2016). From this analysis, it is notable that a simple process is considered to collect pure copper from its ore body.

How Copper Mining Impacts the Environment

Copper mining is a complex procedure that requires the completion of several steps if a pure metallic compound is to be obtained. This means that it is capable of presenting complicated impacts on the natural environment. Copper mining can take different forms depending on the location of the identified ores and the policies put in place in the selected country (Yaras & Arslanoglu 2017). Nonetheless, the entire process will have detrimental effects on the surrounding environment. Due to the intensity of operations and involvement of heavy machinery, this process results in land degradation. The affected regions will have huge mine sites that disorient the original integrity of the environment.

Since copper is one of the most valuable metals in the world today due to its key uses, many companies continue to mine it in different countries. This practice has triggered the predicament of deforestation (Sikamo, Mwanza & Mweemba 2016). Additionally, rainwater collects in abandoned mine sites or existing ones, thereby leaking into nearby rivers, boreholes, or aquifers. This means that more people are at risk of being poisoned by this compound.

Air pollution is another common problem that individuals living near copper mines report frequently. This challenge is attributable to the use of heavy blasting materials and machinery. The dust usually contains hazardous chemicals that have negative health impacts on communities and animals. Some of the common ailments observed in most of the affected regions include asthma, silicosis, and tuberculosis (Mensah et al., 2015). This challenge arises from the toxic nature of high levels of copper. These problems explain why companies and stakeholders in the mining industry should implement superior appropriate measures and strategies to overcome them. Such a practice will ensure that they meet the needs of the affected individuals and make it easier for them to pursue their aims.

Copper processing can have significant negative implications on the integrity of the environment. For instance, the procedure is capable of producing tailings and overburden that have the potential to contaminate different surroundings. According to Mensah et al. (2015), some residual copper is left in the environment since around 85 percent of the compound is obtained through the refining process. This means that it will pose health problems to people and aquatic life. Other metals are present in the produced tailings, such as iron and molybdenum. During the separation process, hazardous chemicals and gases will be released, such as sulfur dioxide. This is a hazardous compound that is capable of resulting in acidic rain, thereby increasing the chances of environmental degradation.

There are several examples that explain why copper is capable of causing negative impacts on the natural environment. For example, Queenstown in Tasmania has been recording large volumes of acidic rain (Mensah et al., 2015). This is also the same case for El Teniente Mine in Chile. Recycling and reusing copper can be an evidence-based approach for minimizing these consequences and maintaining the integrity of the environment.

Farmlands that are polluted with this metal compound will have far-reaching impacts on both animals and human beings. This is the case since the absorption of copper in the body can have detrimental health outcomes. This form of poisoning can disorient the normal functions of body organs and put the individual at risk of various conditions. People living in areas that are known to produce copper continue to face these negative impacts (Yaras & Arslanoglu 2017). Such challenges explain why a superior model is needed to overcome this problem and ensure that more people lead high-quality lives and eventually achieve their potential.

The above discussion has identified mining as a major economic activity that supports the performance and integrity of many factories, countries, and companies. However, this practice continues to affect the natural environment and making it incapable of supporting future populations. Mining activities result in deforestation, land obliteration, air pollution, acidic rain, and health hazards. The separation of copper from its parent ore is a procedure that has been observed to result in numerous negative impacts on the environment and human beings. These insights should, therefore, become powerful ideas for encouraging governments and policymakers to implement superior guidelines that will ensure that miners minimize these negativities by remediating sites.

Mensah, AK, Mahiri, IO, Owusu, O, Mireku, OD, Wireko, I & Kissi, EA 2015, ‘Environmental impacts of mining: a study of mining communities in Ghana’, Applied Ecology and Environmental Sciences, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 81-94.

Minerals Council of Australia 2019, Australian minerals , Web.

Motoori, R, McLellan, BC & Tezuka, T 2018, ‘Environmental implications of resource security strategies for critical minerals: a case study of copper in Japan’, Minerals, vol. 8, no. 12, pp. 558-586.

Sikamo, J, Mwanza, A & Mweemba, C 2016, ‘Copper mining in Zambia – history and future’, The Journal of the South African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, vol. 116, no. 1, pp. 491-496.

Yaras, A & Arslanoglu, H 2017, ‘Leaching behaviour of low-grade copper ore in the presence of organic acid’, Canadian Metallurgical Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 3, pp. 319-327.

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The Environmental Problems Caused by Mining

In a world driven by consumerism where the majority of products fail to be recycled, mining remains essential for providing resources to help economies grow and improve standards of living. However, is this causing us to dig ourselves into a growing hole of issues? We examine the biggest environmental problems caused by mining.

The mining and processing of minerals provides us with the building blocks required to form much of the infrastructure needed to support modern societies. In 2020, the top 40 mining companies had together accumulated a total revenue of USD$544 billion, which was up 4% on the previous year. Whilst demand for some resources such as coal is falling, other resources such as copper are seeing increasing demand as new products and technologies require different materials. For example, a single lithium-ion electric vehicle battery pack (a type known as NMC111) uses around 16kg of lithium, 46kg of nickel, 46kg of cobalt and 43kg of manganese.

However, the process of mining remains intense and invasive, and operations often leave large environmental impacts on the local surroundings as well as wider implications for the environmental health of the planet.

Water Use in Mining

Mining and mineral processing operations often have high water footprints as many stages require the use of water. Examples include dust mitigation, removing soluble particles, sieving and separation processes, and in creating tailings dams for waste management. Although some stages, such as the separation of minerals, can reuse and recycle the water, other stages such as spraying to remove airborne dust will lead to pollution of the water, preventing water from being recycled. High water use in mining operations can lead to reduced access for local people to uncontaminated freshwater supplies and can result in a local area suffering from water stress.

However, compared to other industries, mining has a relatively small water usage and often a large fraction of the water used is saline so does not have much use in other industries or domestically. For example, the US has one of the highest rates of mineral production in the world after China and Australia; however, the water used for mining only makes up about 1% of the total national water use with 47% of this water being low quality saline water.

Mining Pollution

There have been many documented instances of environmental pollution caused by mining operations, which are often caused by leakages of mining tailings. Mining tailings are the materials left behind after the economically valuable fraction of material has been extracted. These materials are often stored in large tailings dams to prevent environmental damage as tailings are often radioactive, toxic or acidic. Tailings consist of valuable substances used in the extraction process such as cyanide, mercury or arsenic; therefore, modern mining programmes often aim to remove these harmful but valuable chemicals to reuse for further mineral separation. In addition to improving efficiency and cutting costs, this minimises the risk of environmental damage by reducing the toxicity of the tailings.

As a result of strict international regulations, pollution caused by mining has been dramatically reduced; however, it is still an ongoing problem in many developing countries where illegal small-scale operations known as ‘artisanal mining’ occur. These low-tech, subsistence mining operations are often unsafe, and the poor management of sites leads to environmental pollution in the region. The problems associated with artisanal mining remain complex as it is difficult to identify and shut down all of these small operations. Furthermore, although artisanal mining can result in dangerous environmental pollution, it does help to alleviate the estimated 40 million people who participate in this industry from poverty.

How Does Mining Impact the Land?

Another key environmental problem associated with mining projects is the land use change that occurs, not only from drilling and excavating open pit mines but also the changes that occur as result of the development of surrounding infrastructure. The latter can include camps to provide accommodation for the miners as well as the railways and roads needed to transport the mined materials. The infrastructure created by mining operations in remote, untouched landscapes can lead to improved access to these regions which may result in further human-caused disturbance to the local ecological systems.

The impact of mining operations on the surrounding land is also closely linked to the ecological setting of the mining sites. For example, the deforestation of primary forests caused by mining for iron ore in the tropical rainforests of Gabon is likely to leave more devastating and longer term ecological damage compared to mining iron ore in the deserts of northern Australia.

A village was set up to support 15,000 miners working in the ruby mine near Ambatondrazaka, Madagascar. Photo: Pardieu et al. (2017) .

However, compared to many other industries such as agriculture, mining uses relatively small pockets of land, and the future of mining could move to using techniques that are arguably even less invasive on the environment by using less land and emitting less pollution. Methods could include underground mining where ore is extracted below the surface with little waste and minimal ecological scarring of the Earth’s surface; phytomining where plants accumulate high concentrations of metals which can then be processed; or even asteroid mining where materials from asteroids could be harvested for their use on Earth.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Mining

It is also important to consider the impact of land use change in the context of greenhouse gas emissions. The destruction of vegetation and soils when land is cleared for mining results in the release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Another important consideration relates to the quantity of greenhouse gases released per unit mass of mined material, as some less concentrated mineral deposits require proportionally higher energy usage. For example, mining a kilogram of diamond produces around 800,000 kg CO 2 e compared to a kilogram of a highly abundant mineral such as iron which produces only about 2 kg CO 2 e .

The creation of products from mined materials uses high amounts of energy throughout the different stages of the production chain and most of this energy is currently sourced from the burning of fossil fuels.

Diagram showing the life cycle of a product made from mined resources where each stage contributes towards the product’s total carbon footprint.

Reducing reliance on fossil fuels in the mining process by electrifying the technology and running it off a green energy grid is a key aim to allow mining to continue along a more sustainable path. Automation of many of the stages of mining is also another vital change that will not only improve safety but also increase efficiency and cut energy costs. However, it will remain difficult to swiftly transition the mining industry into becoming a net zero emitter, and with the short supply of many rare earth metals, it is crucial to reuse and recycle mined materials wherever possible.

You might also like: We Can Save the World with Public Transportation and Not Electric Cars

Looking Ahead

Overall, when considering the environmental ramifications of mining, it is important to weigh up the social and environmental damages caused by extracting the minerals against the benefits gained from the use of the final product. As consumers, it is important that we are aware that our personal decisions to purchase new products containing finite mined materials are associated with high water use, land use, pollution, and the release of greenhouse gases.

Mining of further resources is required to support the growing global population and allow for the creation of green infrastructure and renewable energy generation. It is vital that governments and companies continue to innovate to create clean mining technologies with strict environmental regulations which will enable the mining industry to pave the way for a sustainable and hopeful future.

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How does the environmental impact of mining for clean energy metals compare to mining for coal, oil and gas, mining, whether for fossil fuels or metals used in clean energy technologies, has serious environmental impacts, and it’s hard to make apples-to-apples comparisons—except in terms of their impact on climate change, where clean energy mining is clearly better..

May 8, 2023

Building clean energy technologies, like wind turbines and electric vehicles (EV), is generally more mineral intensive than using fossil fuels. 1 An EV requires six times more minerals than a conventional car (not counting steel and aluminum), 2 while building a wind plant uses nine times more minerals than a gas-fired plant. 3 Certain materials are particularly critical for the clean energy transition. These include lithium used in the batteries that run EVs, rare earth minerals in the magnets that allow wind turbines to make electricity, and copper, which is used for electricity transmission . “The argument could be made that, with the clean energy transition, we’re exchanging a fossil fuel-based energy system with a metals-based energy system,” says Scott Odell, a visiting assistant professor of geography at George Washington University and visiting scientist at the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative specializing in clean energy and mining. As the clean energy transition moves forward, the demand for these materials will grow. Projections from the International Energy Agency (IEA) suggest that by 2040 the demand for copper could more than double, while the demand for lithium could grow over 40 times—if, that is, the world builds enough clean energy to meet the international climate goals set by the 2015 Paris Agreement . 1 This growing demand will mean more and larger mines, which come with real risks to communities and to biodiversity. 4 So is the direct impact of all this mining for clean energy greater or smaller than the impact of mining for fossil fuels? That answer, unfortunately, isn’t straightforward. Odell explains that making an apples-to-apples comparison is challenging, because methods for extracting and processing oil and coal are different than those for metal mining. Even mining two different metals—or two different deposits of the same metal—can call for different techniques. “I think if someone were to tell you one or the other is better in terms of direct impacts pound for pound, you should ask a lot of questions about how they got to that answer,” says Odell. We shouldn’t discount the amount of resource extraction we already do to power our current, climate-warming energy system. The volume of fossil fuels we mine today dwarfs the amount of clean energy minerals the world will need in the future. In 2021, over 7.5 billion tons of coal were extracted from the ground, 5 while the IEA projects that the total amount of minerals needed for clean energy technology by 2040 will be under 30 million tons. 1 Yet even this becomes complicated when one factors in the percentage of material extracted from a mine that is actually the usable resource we want. For coal, this number can range from less than 40 to as high as 90 percent. 6 In contrast, Odell explains, this number for a copper deposit may be less than one percent, meaning that much more material needs to be extracted and processed for the same volume of output. But there is one area where clean energy definitely wins out: climate-warming carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions . The emissions created by extracting minerals from the ground are tiny compared to those created by burning fossil fuels: a 2020 report from the IEA found that for every gigawatt of a clean energy technology that’s installed, millions of tons of CO 2 emissions can be avoided. 7 Given the urgent threat of climate change, Odell says the clean energy transition is necessary. However, he cautions that we must be aware of the environmental and social impacts of mining for clean energy materials. “What I worry about is, if we don’t solve climate change with an eye towards environmental justice , we could create more social and environmental crises for ourselves down the road. So we have to do it carefully, contemplatively and intelligently.” Odell believes that the way forward for clean energy mining is through three main changes. The first is to reduce consumption so we need fewer materials in the first place, such as by investing in more public transportation and walkable cities , which would reduce the need for mineral-intensive EVs. The second is to advance the circular economy, reusing minerals instead of mining new ones. “There are a lot of metals already in the system and at the end of their lifespan, we send a lot of those to the dump,” he says. Reducing consumption and improving recycling, however, won’t fill all of the demand for clean energy minerals. “We’re still going to need to do some digging,” says Odell. So the third change we need is to raise industry standards and adopt regulations to make sure mining is done in a more environmentally and socially responsible way.

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Systematic Map Protocol
Open access
Published: 21 February 2019

Evidence of the impacts of metal mining and the effectiveness of mining mitigation measures on social–ecological systems in Arctic and boreal regions: a systematic map protocol

Neal R. Haddaway ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3902-2234 1 , 2 ,
Steven J. Cooke 3 ,
Pamela Lesser 4 ,
Biljana Macura 1 ,
Annika E. Nilsson 1 ,
Jessica J. Taylor 3 &
Kaisa Raito 5

Environmental Evidence volume 8 , Article number: 9 ( 2019 ) Cite this article

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A Systematic Map to this article was published on 08 September 2022

Mining activities, including prospecting, exploration, construction, operation, maintenance, expansion, abandonment, decommissioning and repurposing of a mine can impact social and environmental systems in a range of positive and negative, and direct and indirect ways. Mining can yield a range of benefits to societies, but it may also cause conflict, not least in relation to above-ground and sub-surface land use. Similarly, mining can alter environments, but remediation and mitigation can restore systems. Boreal and Arctic regions are sensitive to impacts from development, both on social and environmental systems. Native ecosystems and aboriginal human communities are typically affected by multiple stressors, including climate change and pollution, for example.

We will search a suite of bibliographic databases, online search engines and organisational websites for relevant research literature using a tested search strategy. We will also make a call for evidence to stakeholders that have been identified in the wider 3MK project ( https://osf.io/cvh3u/ ). We will screen identified and retrieved articles at two distinct stages (title and abstract, and full text) according to a predetermined set of inclusion criteria, with consistency checks at each level to ensure criteria can be made operational. We will then extract detailed information relating to causal linkages between actions or impacts and measured outcomes, along with descriptive information about the articles and studies and enter data into an interactive systematic map database. We will visualise this database on an Evidence Atlas (an interactive, cartographic map) and identify knowledge gaps and clusters using Heat Maps (cross-tabulations of important variables, such as mineral type and studied impacts). We will identify good research practices that may support researchers in selecting the best study designs where these are clear in the evidence base.

On the impacts of mining

Mining activities, including prospecting, exploration, construction, operation, maintenance, expansion, abandonment, decommissioning and repurposing of a mine can impact social and environmental systems in a range of positive and negative, and direct and indirect ways. Mine exploration, construction, operation, and maintenance may result in land-use change, and may have associated negative impacts on environments, including deforestation, erosion, contamination and alteration of soil profiles, contamination of local streams and wetlands, and an increase in noise level, dust and emissions (e.g. [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ]). Mine abandonment, decommissioning and repurposing may also result in similar significant environmental impacts, such as soil and water contamination [ 6 , 7 , 8 ]. Beyond the mines themselves, infrastructure built to support mining activities, such as roads, ports, railway tracks, and power lines, can affect migratory routes of animals and increase habitat fragmentation [ 9 , 10 ].

Mining can also have positive and negative impacts on humans and societies. Negative impacts include those on human health (e.g. [ 11 ]) and living standards [ 12 ], for example. Mining is also known to affect traditional practices of Indigenous peoples living in nearby communities [ 13 ], and conflicts in land use are also often present, as are other social impacts including those related to public health and human wellbeing (e.g. [ 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 ]. In terms of positive impacts, mining is often a source of local employment and may contribute to local and regional economies [ 18 , 19 ]. Remediation of the potential environmental impacts, for example through water treatment and ecological restoration, can have positive net effects on environmental systems [ 20 ]. Mine abandonment, decommissioning and repurposing can also have both positive and negative social impacts. Examples of negative impacts include loss of jobs and local identities [ 21 ], while positive impact can include opportunities for new economic activities [ 22 ], e.g. in the repurposing of mines to become tourist attractions.

Mitigation measures

‘Mitigation measures’ (as described in the impact assessment literature) are implemented to avoid, eliminate, reduce, control or compensate for negative impacts and ameliorate impacted systems [ 23 ]. Such measures must be considered and outlined in environmental and social impact assessments (EIAs and SIAs) that are conducted prior to major activities such as resource extraction [ 24 , 25 ]. Mitigation of negative environmental impacts in one system (e.g. water or soil) can influence other systems such as wellbeing of local communities and biodiversity in a positive or negative manner [ 23 ]. A wide range of technological engineering solutions have been implemented to treat contaminated waters (e.g. constructed wetlands [ 26 ], reactive barriers treating groundwater [ 27 ], conventional wastewater treatment plants). Phytoremediation of contaminated land is also an area of active research [ 28 ].

Mitigation measures designed to alleviate the negative impacts of mining on social and environmental systems may not always be effective, particularly in the long-term and across systems, e.g. a mitigation designed to affect an environmental change may have knock on changes in a social system. Indeed, the measures may have unintentional adverse impacts on environments and societies. To date, little research appears to have been conducted into mitigation measure effectiveness, and we were unable to find any synthesis or overview of the systems-level effectiveness of metal mining mitigation measures.

Mining in the Arctic

Boreal and Arctic regions are sensitive to impacts from mining and mining-related activities [ 29 , 30 ], both on social and environmental systems: these northern latitudes are often considered harsh and thus challenging for human activities and industrial development. However, the Arctic is home to substantial mineral resources [ 31 , 32 ] and has been in focus for mining activities for several 100 years, with a marked increase in the early 20th century and intensifying interest in exploration and exploitation in recent years to meet a growing global demand for metals (Fig. 1 ). Given the region’s geological features and society’s need for metals, resource extraction is likely to dominate discourse on development of northern latitudes in the near future. As of 2015, there were some 373 mineral mines across Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, The Faroes, Norway (including Svalbard), Sweden, Finland and Russia (see Table 1 ), with the top five minerals being gold, iron, copper, nickel and zinc [ 33 ].

Map of mines in the Arctic region active as of 2011

Many topics relating to mining and its impacts on environmental and social systems are underrepresented in the literature as illustrated by the following example. The Sami people are a group of traditional people inhabiting a region spanning northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. Sami people are affected by a range of external pressures, one of which pertains to resource extraction and land rights, particularly in relation to nomadic reindeer herding. However, there is almost no published research on the topic [ 34 ].

The literature on the environmental and social impacts of mining has grown in recent years, but despite its clear importance, there has been little synthesis of research knowledge pertaining to the social and environmental impacts of metal mining in Arctic and boreal regions. The absence of a consolidated knowledge base on the impacts of mining and the effectiveness of mitigation measures in Arctic and boreal regions is a significant knowledge gap in the face of the continued promotion of extractive industries. There is thus an urgent need for approaches that can transparently and legitimately gather research evidence on the potential environmental and social impacts of mining and the impacts of associated mitigation measures in a rigorous manner.

Stakeholder engagement

This systematic map forms a key task within a broader knowledge synthesis project called 3MK (Mapping the impacts of Mining using Multiple Knowledges, https://osf.io/cvh3u/ ). The stakeholder group for this map includes representatives of organisations affected by the broader 3MK project knowledge mapping project or who have special interests in the project outcome. We define stakeholders here as all individuals or organisations that might be affected by the systematic map work or its findings [ 35 , 36 ], and thus broadly includes researchers and the Working and Advisory Group for this project.

Invitations to be included in this group were based on an initial stakeholder mapping process and soliciting expressions of interest (see Stakeholder Engagement Methodology Document, https://osf.io/cvh3u/ ). This group included government ministries and agencies such as the Ministry of Enterprise and Innovation, the Mineral Inspectorate (Bergstaten) and County Administrative Boards, the mining industries’ branch organisation (Svemin) and individual companies such as LKAB Minerals and Boliden AB, Sami organisations, including the Sami Parliament, related research projects, and representatives of international assessment processes, such as activities within the Arctic Council. Stakeholders were invited to a specific meeting (held at Stockholm Environment Institute in September 2018) to help refine the scope, define the key elements of the review question, finalise a search strategy, and suggest sources of evidence, and also to subsequently provide comments on the structure of the protocol .

Objective of the review

The broader 3MK project aims to develop a multiple evidence base methodology [ 37 ] combining systematic review approaches with documentation of Indigenous and local knowledge and to apply this approach in a study of the impacts of metal mining and impacts of mitigation measures. This systematic map aims to answer the question:

What research evidence exists on the impacts of metal mining and its mitigation measures on social and environmental systems in Arctic and boreal regions?

The review question has the following key elements:

Social, technological (i.e. industrial contexts, heavily altered environments, etc.) and environmental systems in circumpolar Arctic and boreal regions.

Impacts (direct and indirect, positive and negative) associated with metal mining (for gold, iron, copper, nickel, zinc, silver, molybdenum and lead) or its mitigation measures. We focus on these metals as they represent approximately 88% of Arctic and boreal mines (according to relevant country operating mine data from 2015, [ 33 ]), and contains the top 5 minerals extracted in the region (gold, iron, copper, nickel and zinc). Furthermore, these minerals include all metals mined within Sweden, the scope of a related workstream within the broader 3MK project ( https://osf.io/cvh3u/ ).

For quantitative research; the absence of metal mining or metal mining mitigation measures—either prior to an activity or in an independent, controlled location lacking such impacts. Additionally, alternative mining systems is a suitable comparator. For qualitative research; comparators are typically implicit, if present and will thus not be required.

Any and all outcomes observed in social and environmental systems described in the literature will be iteratively identified and catalogued.

Both quantitative and qualitative research will be included.

The review will follow the Collaboration for Environmental Evidence Guidelines and Standards for Evidence Synthesis in Environmental Management [ 38 ] and it conforms to ROSES reporting standards [ 39 ] (see Additional file 1 ).

Searching for articles

Bibliographic database searches.

We will search bibliographic databases using a tested search string adapted to each database according to the necessary input syntax of each resource. The Boolean version of the search string that will be used in Web of Science Core Collections can be found in Additional file 2 .

We will search across 17 bibliographic databases as show in Table 2 . Bibliographic database searches will be performed in English only, since these databases catalogue research using English titles and abstracts.

Web-based search engines

Searches for academic (i.e. file-drawer) and organisational grey literature (as defined by [ 40 ]) will be performed in Google Scholar, which has been shown to be effective in retrieving these types of grey literature [ 41 ]. The search strings used to search for literature in Google Scholar are described in detail in Additional file 3 .

Search results will be exported from Google Scholar using Publish or Perish [ 42 ], which allows the first 1000 results to be exported. These records will be added to the bibliographic database search results prior to duplicate removal.

Organisational websites

In order to identify organisational grey literature, we will search for relevant evidence across the suite of organisational websites listed in Table 3 . For each website, we will save the first 100 search results from each search string as PDF/HTML files and screening the results in situ, recording all relevant full texts for inclusion in the systematic map database. The search terms used will be based on the same terms used in the Google Scholar searches described above but will be adapted iteratively for each website depending on the relevance of the results obtained. In addition, we will hand search each website to locate and screen any articles found in publications or bibliography sections of the sites. All search activities will be recorded and described in the systematic map report.

Bibliographic searches

Relevant reviews that are identified during screening will be reserved for assessment of potentially missed records. Once screening is complete (see below), we will screen the reference lists of these reviews and include relevant full texts in the systematic map database. We will also retain these relevant reviews in an additional systematic map database of review articles.

Estimating the comprehensiveness of the search

A set of 41 studies known to be relevant have been provided by the Advisory Team and Working Group (review team); the benchmark list (see Additional file 4 ). During scoping and development of the search string, the bibliographic database search results will be checked to ascertain whether any of these studies were not found. For any cases where articles on the benchmark list are missed by the draft search string, we will examine why these studies may have been missed and adapt the search string accordingly.

Search update

We will perform a search update immediately prior to completion of the systematic map database (i.e. once coding and meta-data is completed). The search strategy for bibliographic databases will be repeated using the same search string, restricting searches to the time period after the original searches were performed. New search results will be processed in the same way as original search results.

Assembling a library of search results

Following searching, we will combine results in a review management platform (e.g. EPPI-Reviewer) and duplicates will be removed using a combination of automated removal and manual screening.

Article screening and study eligibility criteria

Screening process.

We will screen records at three levels: title, abstract and full text. Screening will be performed using a review management platform (e.g. Rayyan, EPPI Reviewer, Colandr).

Consistency checking

A subset of 10% of all titles and abstracts will be screened by two reviewers, with all disagreements discussed in detail. Refinements of the inclusion criteria will be made in liaison with the entire review team where necessary. A kappa test will be performed on the outputs of screening of this subset and where agreement is below k = 0.6, a further 10% of records will be screened and tested. Only when a kappa score of greater than 0.6 is obtained will a single reviewer screen the remaining records. Consistency checking on a subset of 10% will be undertaken at full text screening in a similar manner, followed by discussion of all disagreements. A kappa test will be performed and consistency checking repeated on a second subset of 10% where agreements is below k = 0.6. Consistency checking will be repeated until a score of greater than 0.6 is obtained.

Eligibility criteria

The following inclusion criteria will be used to assess relevance of studies identified through searching. All inclusion criteria will be used at full text screening, but we believe that data type and comparator are unlikely to be useful at title and abstract screening, since this information is often not well-reported in titles or abstracts.

We will include social, technological and environmental systems in Arctic and boreal regions based on political boundaries as follows (this encompasses various definitions of boreal zones, rather than any one specific definition for comprehensiveness and ease of understanding): Canada, USA (Alaska), Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Norway (including Svalbard), Sweden, Finland, and Russia.

We will include all impacts (positive, negative, direct and indirect) associated with any aspect of metal mining and its mitigation measures. We will include research pertaining to all stages of mining, from prospecting onwards as follows: prospecting, exploration, construction, operation, maintenance, expansion, abandonment, decommissioning, reopening and repurposing. Eligible mines will include those of gold, iron, copper, nickel, zinc, silver, molybdenum and lead.

For quantitative research; the absence of metal mining or metal mining mitigation measures—either prior to an activity or in an independent, controlled location lacking such impacts. For qualitative research; comparators are typically implicit, if present and will thus not be required.

Any and all outcomes (i.e. measured impacts) observed in social, technological and environmental systems will be included.

We will include both quantitative and qualitative research.

We will include both primary empirical research and secondary research (reviews will be catalogued in a separate database). Modelling studies and commentaries will not be included.

For all articles excluded at title and abstract or full text levels, reasons for exclusion will be provided in the form of one or more a priori exclusion criteria as follows:

Exclude, not Arctic or boreal (population).

Exclude, no primary data (i.e. commentary, modelling article or similar) (study type).

Exclude, no comparator [for quantitative studies only].

Exclude, not mining or mining mitigation measures (intervention/exposure).

Exclude, not relevant metal mining (intervention/exposure) [this category is related to the above intervention/exposure exclusion criteria but will only be selected where all other criteria are met, facilitating expansion of the map in the future].

Exclude, not an existing mine (planned or unrealised mining activity).

Full text retrieval

We will attempt to retrieve full texts of relevant abstracts using Stockholm University and Carleton University library subscriptions. Where full texts cannot be readily retrieved this way (or via associated library inter-loan networks), we will make use of institutional access provided to our Advisory Team members, including: University College London, KTH, University of Lapland, and SLU. Where records still cannot be obtained, requests for articles will be sent to corresponding authors where email addresses are provided and/or requests for full texts will be made through ResearchGate.

Study validity assessment

This systematic map will not involve an assessment of study validity (an optional part of systematic maps), although some extracted meta-data and coding will relate to internal validity.

Demonstrating procedural objectivity

None of the review team has authored or worked on research within this field prior to starting this project, but members of the Advisory Team and project Working Group will be prevented from providing advice or comments relating specifically to research papers to which they may have contributed.

Data coding strategy

We will extract and code a range of variables, outlined in Table 4 . All meta-data and coding will be included in a detailed systematic map database, with each line representing one study-location (i.e. each independent study conducted in each independent location).

Meta-data extraction and coding will be performed by multiple reviewers following consistency checking on an initial coding of subset of between 10 and 15 full texts, discussing all disagreements. The remaining full texts will then be coded. If resources allow we may contact authors by email with requests for missing information.

Study mapping and presentation

We will display the results of the systematic mapping using a ROSES flow diagram [ 44 ]. We will narratively synthesise the relevant evidence base in our systematic map using descriptive plots and tables showing the number of studies identified across the variables described above. For more complex data, we will use heat maps to display the volume of evidence across multiple variables (see “ Knowledge gap and cluster identification strategy ”, below).

We will display the contents of our systematic map database in an Evidence Atlas; an interactive, web-based geographical information system showing all meta-data and coding on a cartographic map.

Knowledge gap and cluster identification strategy

We will use interactive heat maps (pivot charts) to display the volume of evidence across multiple dimensions of meta-data in order to identify knowledge gaps (sub-topics un- or under-represented by evidence) and knowledge clusters (sub-topics with sufficient evidence to allow full synthesis). Examples of meta-data variables that will be used together include (this is an indicative rather than exhaustive list):

Study location (country or broad region) versus outcome.

Study location (country or broad region) versus mine type.

Study location (country or broad region) versus data/study type.

Outcome versus mine type.

Outcome versus data/study type.

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Authors’ contributions

NRH drafted the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Acknowledgements

We thank the project Advisory Team for comments on the project and the draft: the team consisted of Dag Avango, Steven Cooke, Sif Johansson, Rebecca Lawrence, Pamela Lesser, Björn Öhlander, Kaisa Raito, Rebecca Rees, and Maria Tengö. We also thank the 3MK stakeholder group for valuable input. We also thank Mistra EviEM for co-funding the first Advisory Group meeting and publication fees for the systematic map.

Competing interests

The authors declare they have no competing interests.

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Not applicable.

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This manuscript is part of a project (3MK: Mapping the impacts of Mining using Multiple Knowledges) funded by a Formas Open Call Grant (2017-00683).

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Neal R. Haddaway, Biljana Macura & Annika E. Nilsson

Africa Centre for Evidence, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa

Neal R. Haddaway

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Steven J. Cooke & Jessica J. Taylor

Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland

Pamela Lesser

Division of Environmental Communication, Department of Urban and Rural Development, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden

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Correspondence to Neal R. Haddaway .

Additional files

Additional file 1..

ROSES form for systematic map protocols.

Additional file 2.

Boolean format search string for database searches.

Additional file 3.

Google Scholar search strategy.

Additional file 4.

Benchmark list of relevant articles for comprehensiveness checking of search strategy.

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Haddaway, N.R., Cooke, S.J., Lesser, P. et al. Evidence of the impacts of metal mining and the effectiveness of mining mitigation measures on social–ecological systems in Arctic and boreal regions: a systematic map protocol. Environ Evid 8 , 9 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13750-019-0152-8

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How ending mining would change the world

Mining fuels the modern world, but it also causes vast environmental damage. What would happen if we tried to do without it?

"If you can't grow it, you have to mine it" goes the miner's credo. The extraction of minerals, metals and fuels from the ground is one of humankind's oldest industries. And our appetite for it is growing.

Society is more dependent on both greater variety and larger volumes of mined substances than ever before. If you live in a middle-income country , every year you use roughly 17 tonnes of raw materials – equivalent to the weight of three elephants and twice as much as 20 years ago. For a person in a high-income country, it is 26 tonnes – or four and a half elephants' worth.

Extracting new materials continues to be cheaper than re-use for many substances, leading some experts to sound the warning about the increasing pressure of mines on the natural world. A growing chorus is concerned that environmental toll of mine-caused pollution and biodiversity loss, as well as the social impacts caused to local communities, could sometimes outweigh the benefits of mining.

But what if we stopped extraction of fossil fuels and minerals entirely? What if, in order to better protect the environment, humanity decided the contents of the Earth's crust were off limits?

It's an unlikely scenario, to be sure, and one that would cause hardship for many people – particularly if it happened suddenly. But imagining a world without access to the underground allows us to examine how dependent we have become on this ongoing extraction. It also invites us to consider the frivolousness with which we often then throw these materials away, and to examine the overlooked potential in this waste as a source of new materials.

So could considering the end of mining help to change how we use materials today?

Victor Maus, a researcher in geoinformatics and sustainability at the University of Economics and Business in Vienna, Austria, has spent the last three years poring over satellite images of the Earth's surface to estimate the total area humans currently give over to mining. The results surprised him . "It's a country-sized area, and that's just with the mines that are reported," he says.

How to Advance Sustainable Mining

Still Only One Earth: Lessons from 50 years of UN sustainable development policy

Mining companies reap huge benefits extracting valuable minerals, but often at a cost to surrounding communities and the environment. Regulating these activities mainly depends on national frameworks and policies, but implementing good practices remains problematic. To truly shift to “sustainable mining,” governments and companies must recognize the social impacts of mining, and enact laws and regulations that require community consultation throughout the life of a mine. ( Download PDF ) ( See all policy briefs ) ( Subscribe to ENB )

As a child, Kongolo Mashimango Reagen spent many days carrying 25-kilo sacks of cobalt from small mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo. His long days started at 5:00 am. Accidents were common. Tunnels dug by hand into the bright red earth often collapsed. He saw many children like himself die in the mines. His uncle sold the cobalt—a critical metal for electric car batteries—to local traders, and Kongolo received free food and board as his payment (Sanderson, 2019).

For more than a decade, informal mines in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo have enabled the global digital revolution. The world’s largest mining companies rub shoulders with miners who dig copper and cobalt by hand with little or no safety precautions (Sanderson, 2019). Small-scale mining is a double-edged sword for these local communities, providing employment but negatively affecting human health and the environment. Large-scale mining also affects communities both positively and negatively, albeit through different dynamics and obligations. The international community has not had much success in regulating mining activities, which remain largely under the purview of national governments.

Yet many countries with rich mineral deposits do not have the capacity to govern mines effectively, with political elites often syphoning off the proceeds.

The Impact of Mining

The extractives or mining industry cause some of the most dramatic impacts on the natural environment and human health. The footprint of mining operations is often visible from outer space, with large areas of excavation standing out in a sea of green forest. Technological advances have amplified the sector’s environmental impact while reducing local economic benefits, since they allow for removal of plant biomass more rapidly. While this is true in many sensitive ecosystems where companies do not respect their contractual obligations, some newly developed technologies favor the environment, such as waterless and zero-waste mines .

Mining activities can affect social and environmental systems in direct and indirect ways. Mine exploration, construction, operation, and maintenance may result in land-use change, leading to deforestation, erosion, contamination and alteration of soil profiles, contamination of local streams and wetlands, and an increase in noise level, dust, and emissions. Mine abandonment, decommissioning, and repurposing can also result in significant environmental impacts, especially soil and water contamination. The infrastructure that supports mining activities, including roads, ports, railway tracks, and power lines, can affect migratory routes of animals and increase habitat fragmentation (Haddaway et al., 2019).

The disposal of tailings is commonly identified as the single greatest environmental impact for most mining operations (Vick, 1990). The volume of tailings requiring storage often exceeds the total volume of the ore being mined and processed, with a dramatic increase over the last century as demand has increased and lower grades of ore are being mined through advances in extraction and processing technology. The rate of tailing production over the past 50 years increased exponentially with some individual mines producing more than 200,000 tonnes of tailings per day (Jakubick et al. 2003). It is therefore critical to research the characteristics and chemical composition of mine tailings during pre-feasibility pilot studies, and to establish the behaviour of the tailings once deposited in their final storage location to determine liabilities and environmental impacts. Following the Vale mine’s tailings dam collapse in Brudaminho, Brazil, in 2019, the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM) led an industry initiative in setting the standards to eliminate similar accidents.

Mining activities can create many jobs, which have the potential to unlock economic opportunities, both directly and indirectly benefitting community members. These economic benefits may not match the scale of profits extracted by mining companies, however, since many mines are also a possible source of child labour, poverty, pollution, and disease. (See Table 1.)

Table 1: Negative and Positive Impacts of Mining
Positive Impacts	Negative Impacts
	annually, across all sectors (UNECA, 2017).

Furthermore, despite providing jobs, for decades most of the revenue from mining has eluded those most affected. Reporting on mining in Ghana, Daniel Twerefou, et al. (2015) note: “... in many mining communities today, the relationship between mining companies and the local community cannot be described as the best… [this] may have downstream impacts on the sector if measures are not put in place to improve the relationship.”

In addition, mineral resources are not renewable. After a period of production and peaking revenues, the productivity and accompanying revenue will inevitably drop, until the resource is depleted and operations cease. Without preparation for this inevitability, host communities will be plunged into poverty, worse than before mining began. This is the so-called “resource curse.” Such over-exploitation coupled with weak resource governance are challenging for many mineral-rich developing countries (Fitriani et al., 2015).

Two extreme pictures emerge when investigating the impacts of mine activities on the surrounding communities. In this sense, mining challenges all three dimensions of sustainable development: economic, social, and environmental. When governments and mining companies do not address these challenges, the areas around mine sites often become degraded landscapes filled with informal settlements and scrambling artisanal miners eking out a living adjacent to the garish mine infrastructure and swarming monster trucks.

The Challenge of International Mining Governance

Traditionally, the international community has taken a “hands-off” approach to mining, although it has been referenced at the sustainable development mega-conferences . It is a general principle of international law that countries have sovereignty over their own natural resources. In fact, this was codified at the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, Sweden, as Principle 21 in the Stockholm Declaration.

Recommendation 56 of the Stockholm Action Plan called on the UN Secretary-General to provide a platform for the exchange of information on mining and mineral processing, including the environmental conditions of mine sites.

States have, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and the principles of international law, the sovereign right to exploit their own resources pursuant to their own environmental policies, and the responsibility to ensure that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to the environment of other States or of areas beyond the limits of national jurisdiction. Stockholm Declaration , Principle 21

Twenty years later, at the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (Earth Summit) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the adopted action plan, Agenda 21 , called for more environmentally sound mining in Chapters 11 (forests), 13 (mountains), and 17 (oceans). Principle 2 of the Rio Declaration , however, reiterated countries’ sovereign right to exploit their own resources.

Ten years later at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), paragraph 46 of Johannesburg Plan of Implementation (JPOI) recognized the importance of mining, minerals, and metals to economic and social development. Paragraph 46 of the JPOI called on governments to: (a) support efforts to address the environmental, economic, health, and social impacts and benefits of mining, minerals, and metals, including workers’ health and safety; (b) enhance the participation of stakeholders to play an active role throughout the life cycles of mining operations, including after closure for rehabilitation purposes; and (c) foster sustainable mining practices.

The WSSD also contributed to the establishment of the Intergovernmental Forum on Mining, Minerals, Metals and Sustainable Development (IGF) to improve governance and decision-making to leverage mining for sustainable development. The IGF now supports 79 member states through capacity building, including improving sustainable mining practices, addressing tax base erosion and profit shifting, and ensuring resource governance and social progress.

Finally, in 2012, at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), the outcome document, The Future We Want , recognized in paragraph 228 the “importance of strong and effective legal and regulatory frameworks, policies and practices for the mining sector that deliver economic and social benefits and include effective safeguards that reduce social and environmental impacts, as well as conserve biodiversity and ecosystems, including during postmining closure.” Despite attention to mining, these conferences never called for a comprehensive international treaty. But there are treaties with provisions that can help regulate the industry. Three categories of international law are relevant to mining: international investment treaties, international human rights law, and environmental conventions and treaties (Pring et al., 1999).

International investment treaties establish the terms and conditions for private investment by nationals and companies of one state in another state. Home country governments enter into these agreements to protect their companies’ investments abroad. Host country governments do so to promote foreign investment in their countries. While these agreements provide strong and effective economic protection for investors, they do not provide similarly strong protections for people and the environment affected by mining investments.

There are human rights agreements that can protect people who work in and live near mining operations. These include the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights , the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights , and the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights . The 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child addresses child labour, and the International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention No. 169 on the rights of Indigenous Peoples is based on respect for the cultures and ways of life of Indigenous and tribal peoples. The nonbinding 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the 2011 UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights also fall under this category. The UN Guiding Principles have driven many mining companies to undertake policies that have a positive influence on host communities, such as creating plans for community development.

The environmental treaties that affect mining the most are those that protect natural areas and resources. A “listing” under one of these treaties can place areas off limits to mining development (Pring et al., 1999). Examples include: the 1971 Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance; the 1972 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage ; and the 1979 Bonn Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals . The 1991 Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty designates Antarctica as a “natural reserve, devoted to peace and science,” and prohibits all activities related to mineral resources. The 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea governs mining on the seabed and subsoil beyond the limits of national jurisdiction. These activities are regulated under the International Seabed Authority .

There are also international treaties that address the transboundary movement of hazardous waste, which can include the disposal of tailings. These include the 1989 Basel Convention on the Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal, the 1991 Bamako Convention and the 1995 Waigani Convention .

Finally, the 2013 Minamata Convention on Mercury addresses the use of mercury in artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM). These miners, primarily in developing countries, use mercury to extract gold from ore because it is relatively inexpensive and easy to use. Nearly all the mercury used in ASGM is eventually released directly into the environment and pollutes the atmosphere, soils, and waterways, exposing miners and their communities to serious health risks.

The Challenge of Domestic Regulation

Despite these international agreements, mining governance still largely relies on national and local institutions and legal frameworks. The biggest challenges are implementation of regulations where they exist, and either a lack of strong penalties, or lack of political will to enforce penalties.

Many governments have adopted the “polluter pays” principle, which has become embedded into environmental frameworks with increasingly stringent requirements. Governments have traditionally used prescriptive approaches (called technology standards) that specify technologies to reduce pollution, but recently performance-based regulation with specific targets for environmental performance and economic instruments have become more widespread (UNDP, 2018). The main tools used to reduce environmental and social impacts are environmental impact assessments, through which governments and mining companies can conduct cumulative and strategic assessments to formulate plans and policies.

The greater dilemma relates to implementation of domestic policies. Governments and mining companies, recognizing the social impacts of mining, have increasingly introduced laws and regulations that require community consultation throughout the life of a mine. The United States, through the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank) and in the European Union through the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Due Diligence frameworks developed strong obligations for companies listed in their stock markets to track their supply chains for conflict minerals. Such initiatives show promise, although they do not necessarily focus on the root cause of the problem, and do not include all minerals.

Unfortunately, some developing countries have been much slower in accepting community consultation and engagement principles, and even where this practice has become enshrined in national laws, proper implementation is often problematic. Some challenges include instances where mine company staff with limited social development expertise either make random decisions about community benefit projects without proper consultation, or social performance spending follows corrupt routes through flawed tender processes with no benefit to the community.

Forging Win-Win Solutions

There is a need for more innovative solutions to optimize the mining industry’s benefits and reduce its negative social and environmental impacts. Public-private partnerships, given enough political will and business commitment, are one such option.

In 2011, Anglo American CEO Mark Cutifani combined forces with the Kellogg Innovation Network’s Peter Bryant to find solutions to the complex challenges facing mining companies. A chronic lack of investment in innovation had reduced productivity, leading to increased costs and subpar returns on capital. At the same time, legacy environmental, health, and safety issues had diminished mining’s social license to operate in many communities. The solution was to recast the mining business model as a development partnership, and to work with stakeholders to pursue shared goals. This initiative saw the development of joint regional plans among government, community, and mine partners, with the southern African region as one of the first to implement such an initiative. These partnerships can jointly improve infrastructure, education, health services, and capacity building for these communities (KIN Development Partner Framework, 2014).

Other similar initiatives are illustrated by the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM). In collaboration with academic researchers, the Council has developed a matrix approach to identify technology solutions for the mining sector across six UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): nutrition and agriculture (SDG 2), good health and wellbeing (SDG 3), clean water and sanitation (SDG 6), affordable and clean energy (SDG 7), industry and innovation (SDG 9), and sustainable communities (SDG 11).

Most mining companies now have some form of corporate social responsibility approach through their activities, or are required to implement environmental, social, and governance principles, a key funding metric used by investors.

Our success as an industry is not only measured by the ounces, carats, or tons we mine, it is also measured by whether we improve people's lives. Mark Cutifani , CEO, Anglo American

Some mining companies have introduced the SDGs into their work. For example, in addition to focusing on energy efficiency, mining companies can leverage their energy demand to extend power to undersupplied areas through partnerships that enable shared use of energy infrastructure, helping to achieve SDG 7. At Semafo’s Mana mine in Burkina Faso, Windiga Energy is building a 20MW solar plant, the largest in sub-Saharan Africa. The Mana mine will purchase energy from the plant, and the surplus will feed the national grid. Similar opportunities exist for the mining sector to contribute to the other SDGs, including catalyzing economic growth and employment (SDG 8), creating more resilient infrastructure (SDG 9), and combating climate change (SDG 13), among others (UNDP, et al., 2016).

At face value, sustainable mining appears to be an oxymoron, since minerals, once extracted, cannot be replaced in their original form. While this is true, it is undeniable that the high value placed on minerals can unlock huge benefits for a community or country. Many recent initiatives have been driven by national government policies or, in some cases, through mining companies that recognize the value of acting justly and introducing sustainability as an objective. The COVID-19 pandemic emphasized the need to prioritize the health and wellbeing of any mine’s most important asset: its labor force. This highlights the need for forging private-public partnerships to strengthen government support services, particularly in rural communities. The key to any sustainable development intervention is to consult with those who can benefit most, the immediate communities. Without addressing their real concerns, they are forced to pay the highest price—far beyond the actual value of the minerals extracted.

Works Consulted

Cutifani, M. & Bryant, P. (2015). Reinventing mining: Creating sustainable value. Kellogg Innovation Network.

Fitriani, E., Hutapea, M., & Tumiwa, F. (2014). Dare to transform: Governing extractive industries in Southeast Asia. In E. Fitriani, et al. (Eds.) Governance on extractive industries: Assessing national experiences to inform regional cooperation in Southeast Asia (pp.1-31). UI Press. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309152110

Haddaway, N.R., Cooke, S.J., Lesser, P., Macura, B., Nilsson, A.E., Taylor, J.J., & Raito, K. (2019). Evidence of the impacts of metal mining and the effectiveness of mining mitigation measures on social–ecological systems in Arctic and boreal regions: A systematic map protocol. Environmental Evidence 8, 9. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13750-019-0152-8

Jakubick, A.G., McKenna, G., & Robertson, A.G. (2003). Stabilisation of tailings deposits: International experience. Mining and the Environment III . https://rgc.ca/files/publications/Sudbury2003_Jakubick_McKenna_AMR.pdf

Pring, G., Otto, J., & Naito, K. (1999). Trends in environmental law affecting the mining industry (Part II), Journal of Energy & Natural Resources Law , 17(2), pp. 151-177, https://doi.org/10.1080/02646811.1999.11433164

Sanderson, H. (2019). Congo, child labour and your electric car. Financial Times . https://www.ft.com/content/c6909812-9ce4-11e9-9c06-a4640c9feebb

Twerefou, D.K., Tutu, K., Owusu-Afriye, J., & Adjei-Mantey, K. (2015). Attitudes of local people to mining policies and interventions. International Growth Center Working Paper E-33107-GHA-1. https://www.theigc.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Twerefou-et-al-2015-Working-paper-1.pdf

United Nations Development Programme, Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, Sustainable Development Solutions Network, & World Economic Forum. (2016). Mapping mining to the Sustainable Development Goals: An atlas . https://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/librarypage/poverty-reduction/mapping-mining-to-the-sdgs--an-atlas.html

United Nations Development Programme. (2018). Managing mining for sustainable development: A sourcebook . https://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/librarypage/poverty-reduction/Managing-Mining-for-SD.html

United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. (2017). Impact of illicit financial flows on domestic resource mobilization: Optimizing revenues from the mineral sector in Africa. https://repository.uneca.org/handle/10855/23862

Vick, S.G. (1990). Planning, design, and analysis of tailings dams. BiTech Publishers. https://open.library.ubc.ca/cIRcle/collections/ubccommunityandpartnerspublicati/52387/items/1.0394902

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What Is The Environmental Impact Of The Mining Industry?

Mines are known to cause severe environmental problems.

Mining is the extraction of minerals and other geological materials of economic value from deposits on the Earth. Mining adversely affects the environment by inducing loss of biodiversity, soil erosion, and contamination of surface water, groundwater, and soil. Mining can also trigger the formation of sinkholes. The leakage of chemicals from mining sites can also have detrimental effects on the health of the population living at or around the mining site.

In some countries, mining companies are expected to adhere to rehabilitation and environmental codes to ensure that the area mined is eventually transformed back into its original state. However, violations of such rules are quite common.

Environmental Impacts Of Mining

As mentioned previously, mining activities can harm the environment in several ways. These are as follows:

Air Pollution

Air quality is adversely affected by mining operations. Unrefined materials are released when mineral deposits are exposed on the surface through mining. Wind erosion and nearby vehicular traffic cause such materials to become airborne. Lead, arsenic, cadmium, and other toxic elements are often present in such particles. These pollutants can damage the health of people living near the mining site. Diseases of the respiratory system and allergies can be triggered by the inhalation of such airborne particles.

Water Pollution

Mining also causes water pollution which includes metal contamination, increased sediment levels in streams, and acid mine drainage. Pollutants released from processing plants, tailing ponds, underground mines, waste-disposal areas, active or abandoned surface or haulage roads, etc., act as the top sources of water pollution. Sediments released through soil erosion cause siltation or the smothering of stream beds. It adversely impacts irrigation, swimming, fishing, domestic water supply, and other activities dependent on such water bodies. High concentrations of toxic chemicals in water bodies pose a survival threat to aquatic flora and fauna and terrestrial species dependent on them for food. The acidic water released from metal mines or coal mines also drains into surface water or seeps below ground to acidify groundwater. The loss of normal pH of water can have disastrous effects on life sustained by such water.

Damage To Land

The creation of landscape blots like open pits and piles of waste rocks due to mining operations can lead to the physical destruction of the land at the mining site. Such disruptions can contribute to the deterioration of the area's flora and fauna. There is also a huge possibility that many of the surface features that were present before mining activities cannot be replaced after the process has ended. The removal of soil layers and deep underground digging can destabilize the ground which threatens the future of roads and buildings in the area. For example, lead ore mining in Galena, Kansas between 1980 and 1985 triggered about 500 subsidence collapse features that led to the abandonment of the mines in the area. The entire mining site was later restored between 1994 and1995.

Loss Of Biodiversity

Often, the worst effects of mining activities are observed after the mining process has ceased. The destruction or drastic modification of the pre-mined landscape can have a catastrophic impact on the biodiversity of that area. Mining leads to a massive habitat loss for a diversity of flora and fauna ranging from soil microorganisms to large mammals. Endemic species are most severely affected since even the slightest disruptions in their habitat can result in extinction or put them at high risk of being wiped out. Toxins released through mining can wipe out entire populations of sensitive species.

Long-Term Ill-effects Of Mining

A landscape affected by mining can take a long time to heal. Sometimes it never recovers. Remediation efforts do not always ensure that the biodiversity of the area is restored. Species might be lost permanently.

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Mining is bad for health: a voyage of discovery

Original Paper
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Published: 09 July 2019
Volume 42 , pages 1153–1165, ( 2020 )

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Mining continues to be a dangerous activity, whether large-scale industrial mining or small-scale artisanal mining. Not only are there accidents, but exposure to dust and toxins, along with stress from the working environment or managerial pressures, give rise to a range of diseases that affect miners. I look at mining and health from various personal perspectives: that of the ordinary man (much of life depends on mined elements in the house, car and phone); as a member of the Society for Environmental Geochemistry and Health (environmental contamination and degradation leads to ill health in nearby communities); as a public health doctor (mining health is affected by many factors, usually acting in a mix, ranging from individual inheritance—genetic makeup, sex, age; personal choices—diet, lifestyle; living conditions—employment, war; social support—family, local community; environmental conditions—education, work; to national and international constraints—trade, economy, natural world); as a volunteer (mining health costs are not restricted to miners or industry but borne by everyone who partakes of mining benefits—all of us); and as a lay preacher (the current global economy concentrates on profit at the expense of the health of miners). Partnership working by academics with communities, government and industry should develop evidence-based solutions. Employment, health, economic stability and environmental protection need not be mutually exclusive. We all need to act.

Health Issues of Mining Workers: Provisions and Challenges in Social Work Perspectives

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Introduction

I have spent many years working at the interface between the environment, both natural and built, and health, in both general medical (family) practice and in community-focussed public health practice (e.g. Stewart 1990 ; Stewart et al. 2003 ; Herm et al. 2005 ; Stewart et al. 2010 ; Mahoney et al. 2015 ; Stewart and Hursthouse 2018 ). However, it was not until a colleague challenged me to contribute to a debate on mining and health that I seriously looked at the specific issues that link mining and health. The following is less of a regular review than a personal assessment of the ways mining affects health. I recount some of the considerations that made me pause for thought during and after the debate. I arrange them by various aspects of my life.

Insight 1—as an ordinary man

First of all, I discovered that it is not possible to ignore the impact of mining on daily living. I own a house, a car and a mobile phone, and all are dependent on mining. In my house, various components arise from mining: the bricks come from clay while the attractive chimney breast is made from local slate. Nails and screws are either iron or zinc, while water pipes are made from copper, zinc, nickel and chrome. The window glass needs silica, feldspar and soda ash for its genesis, while the concrete base supporting the house consists of limestone, clay, shale and gypsum. Locks and hinges are also made from copper, zinc or iron, and the insulation is glass wool (silica, feldspar, soda ash) or expanded vermiculite.

Without the following mined essentials, the car would not function properly: glass (as above), battery (lead, zinc), paint (cadmium), steel (an alloy of iron and other metals) or aluminium, while under the bonnet there is a whole mix of elements, including nickel, copper, molybdenum, beryllium, vanadium, as well as a mineral (mica).

And my mobile phone contains gold coating the wires on the circuit boards (possibly the only gold I own), copper acting as a transistor in the circuit boards, tantalum to store electricity in the circuit boards, rare earth elements to provide colours and tungsten to help the phone vibrate.

To take only one example, tantalum is used by many industries and manufacturers in capacitors. It takes about one tonne of rock to produce 30 grams of tantalum. Most tantalum comes from Central Africa, much of it being panned from ore in the Democratic Republic of Congo by small-scale miners. The trade is under the control of militia groups who rule by murder, rape and brutality. Smuggling of the element is undertaken to avoid sanctions and tax, leading to exploitation and corruption (Bell 2014a , b ). Not a healthy lifestyle.

And I learnt that small-scale artisanal mining has particular challenges that are not seen in large-scale mines, including the association of gold mining with health problems from psychosocial, cardiovascular, respiratory and sexual risks, nutritional, water and sanitation issues, and resulting in malaria, upper respiratory tract diseases, especially pulmonary tuberculosis and silicosis, and skin diseases, as well as the injuries and accidents more commonly associated with mining (Basu et al. 2015 ). Not a healthy occupation. Since artisanal mining may be the only source of income for these miners and families, it is important to find ways to improve their lot and make artisanal mining safer.

Insight 2—a member of SEGH

As a medical doctor, I have found fellow members and the many meetings of the Society of Environmental Geochemistry and Health ( http://www.segh.net/ ) which I have attended, along with this journal, very helpful over may years in exploring the links between the environment and health. My initial exploration on mining within the Society of Environmental Geochemistry and Health fold focussed on the environment, but soon led back to health.

Although mining provides resources that are essential to the basic needs of civilisation and the requirements of the high technology world that most of us live in, nevertheless, it can result in substantial environmental and human health problems. Across the world, mining contributes to erosion, sinkholes, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, significant use of water resources, dammed rivers and ponded waters, wastewater disposal issues, acid mine drainage and contamination of soil, ground and surface water, all of which can lead to health issues in local populations (Rajaee et al. 2015 ; CSIR 2013 ; Liao et al. 2016 ). Not a good reputation.

Underground coal mining is far more dangerous than surface mining, including the loathsome removal of whole mountaintops to access coal seams. One tonne of rock removal can produce a half tonne of coal. A much better return than mining for tantalum. However, between 10 and 21% of coal miners develop coal miners’ pneumoconiosis (black lung disease) from components in the dust (Blackley et al. 2018 ), while in China a prevalence of over 30% has been reported (Cui et al. 2015 ). An earlier systematic analysis of Chinese studies reported an overall prevalence of 6%, almost doubling to 11% in those with tuberculosis (Mo et al. 2013 ). Whatever the true rate of coal miners’ pneumoconiosis (the discrepancies might be due to different levels of exposure, different diagnostic criteria, different recording systems, different genetic susceptibilities or the like), it is too high as the disease is preventable. Classical silica-induced pneumoconiosis is found in older miners, both open-cast and underground, with a lengthy exposure (Leung et al. 2012 ) (see also below).

Globally, mining is a major source of particulate matter. Mining activities play an important but underappreciated role in the generation of contaminated atmospheric dust and aerosol and the transport of metal and metalloid contaminants (Csavina et al. 2012a ; Meyer et al. 2015 ). Coarse particles form a large proportion of resulting dust particles and are usually too heavy to travel far, although they may still contribute to exposure of workers and nearby residents (Barbieri et al. 2014 ; Zota et al. 2016 ). The combination of mining activities and mechanical dispersion via water and wind has moved heavy metals around 4 km from a mine site in Iran (Mokhtari et al. 2018 ), while in Hunan Province, China, metal aerial contamination peaked around the 1 km mark. However, topography was more important than wind in the distribution of metals (Ding et al. 2017 ).

Fine particles (PM 10 or smaller), such as those resulting from smelting operations or found in slag dumps or arising from the erosion of contaminated soil, disperse readily into the environment, often in association with aerosols, and may travel quite a lot further than anticipated (Reynolds et al. 2010 ; Meyer et al. 2015 ; Yu et al. 2019 ). Fine particles also penetrate more deeply throughout the respiratory system and are more likely to result in adverse health effects ( https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/about/airquality.html ; Csavina et al. 2012a , b ; Entwistle et al. 2019 and references therein). In some situations, ingestion is the main pathway (Ishtiaq et al. 2018 ). Mining operations are understood to have some of the highest concentrations of potential harmful contaminants derived through anthropogenic activities, along with the highest particulate emissions and the highest risk to both human and environmental health (Csavina et al. 2012b ; Meyer et al. 2015 ).

Overall, erosion, flooding, deforestation and the contamination and consumption of ground and surface waters all act as stressors on health of local communities, depleting food supplies and delivering harmful elements into the food chain (Rajaee et al. 2015 ). Not good news.

Insight 3—a public health doctor

The World Health Organisation has described health as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity (WHO 1946 ). Although this misses the spiritual elements of health, it remains the most quoted description. More enigmatic but more thought-provoking is health as “the strength to be human” (Fergusson 1993 ).

Moving from clinical medicine as a general practitioner, to become a public health physician, meant moving my focus from the patient before me, and the disease processes within them, to the community, and the processes that affect health at a population, rather than individual, level.

The determinants of health are very important within public health (Dahlgren and Whitehead 1991 ); they are a diverse range of personal, social, occupational, environmental and economic factors which influence people’s mental and physical health; they may operate at the individual, community or international level and be environmental, employment-related or social (Fig. 1 ). Sometimes the term “wider determinants” is used to summarise the non-personal influences that mould health and illness. I noted that mining determinants are active in many different situations (Lewis et al. 2017 ) (Fig. 1 ). Not a simple issue.

Mining-related determinants of disease, associated diseases and dimension (scale) of the disease burden [from Entwistle et al. ( 2019 ). Used freely under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ); the ‘disease pyramid’© is after Stewart and Hursthouse ( 2018 )]

Environmental

Personal characteristics, such as age and sex, are important determinants, particularly in small-scale artisanal mining where children and women are more commonly involved than in large-scale industrial mining operations. Women and girls carry eggs of all their children so that any exposure to potentially harmful elements may affect the next generation as well as themselves (Sen et al. 2015 ; Appleton et al. 2017 ). Neurotoxic metals including arsenic, lead and mercury, as well as under- or over-exposure to essential trace elements such as zinc and manganese, are associated with perturbed foetal growth, adverse birth outcomes and cognitive and behavioural problems in later childhood (Sanders et al. 2015 ; Zheng et al. 2016 ). There is evidence that, although sperm is generated daily after puberty, there is transmission through sperm to the next generation of some early life exposures through epigenetic mechanisms; currently the evidence is limited to obesity, stress, risk of diabetic death, cardiovascular diseases and the like (Pembrey et al. 2014 ; Fernandez-Twinn et al. 2015 ), but it is possible that further work will add environmental metals to known epigenetic toxins such as endocrine disruptors (Marsit 2015 ).

Diet can be an important route of exposure to harmful contaminants, particularly when sourced from near the mines or from land affected by mining operations (Zhu et al. 2008 ). Nigeria has seen an outbreak of acute lead poisoning killing 400–500 children, mainly < 5 years of age, with thousands more affected, arising from the household processing of gold from artisanal mines contaminating food (Dooyema et al. 2012 ; Tirima et al. 2018 ).

The poor may not have a lot of choice in housing, often living close to mines or on top of mine waste (Demetriades 2011 ). House dust can be the main route of exposure of families, including children and pregnant women, who are usually the most vulnerable (Martin et al. 2014 ; Zota et al. 2016 ; Lewis et al. 2017 ).

The unrestricted use of metals leads to high levels of exposure. In particular, the use of elemental mercury in small-scale artisanal gold mining leads to methyl-mercury pollution of the local environment and ingestion through the locally grown diet. Inhalation of elemental Hg by the children and other workers, often working in kitchens away from the actual mine, is an issue (Basu et al. 2015 ). Mercury is toxic to the brain (mad hatter’s disease) and growing nervous system (Minamata disease).

Occupational

Employment issues are important, different occupations having different risks and exposures. For example, in Turkish open-cast mines, surface installations, workshops and the mining area itself have the highest probability of serious, non-fatal accidents, which occur mainly in transport and manual handling (Onder and Mutlu 2016 ). Ergonomic hazards are usually minimised in large-scale mining, due to the highly mechanised state, but are constantly present in small-scale mining. Back pain, upper limb pain, lower limb pain are common (Jiménez-Forero et al. 2015 ). Fractures and contusions are the most frequently occurring injuries in small-scale mining, with collapse of the mine pits, drowning, crushing and falls the most frequently reported cause of accidents (Kyeremateng-Amoah and Clarke 2015 ; Basu et al. 2015 ). Overall, the rates of small-scale mining injuries in Ghana far outstrip the rates in the large-scale mines of South Africa or the USA. Safety knowledge is very limited (Calys-Tagoe et al. 2015 ; Long et al. 2015 ).

Safety aspects in work (notably role conflict, role ambiguity, quantitative job insecurity, or managerial issues) and of coping (namely avoidance style or changes in the work situation) contribute to compliance (or not) with safety procedures (Wysokiński et al. 2015 ; Zhang et al. 2016 ; Jacobs and Pienaar 2017 ) and the potential for injury from accidents. Migrant miners returning home to Botswana from South Africa have missed surveillance, resulting in not being diagnosed or compensated for occupational disease (Steen et al. 1997 ). Unfortunately, the situation affects South African miners as well as migrants and has only slowly improved in the intervening years (Kistnasamy et al. 2018 ).

Recycling of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) is increasing, but exposes the recycling workers to complex contaminant mixtures of metalliferous dusts associated with precious metals and rare earth elements, mixed with the organics and plastics found in such equipment that can adversely affect health (Lau et al. 2014 ; Annamalai 2015 ; Cesaro et al. 2018 ), so needs the same considerations as mining in terms of surveillance and control.

Human and social

Migration to find work in mines often results in poor infrastructure and crowded living conditions which, allied with lack of social cohesion and support increases the risk of pathogen exposure (e.g. HIV, tuberculosis) and stress (Basu et al. 2015 ). South African miners have the highest incidence of tuberculosis (2500–3000 cases per 100,000 people) of any working population in the world (World Bank 2014 ). Across southern Africa, the triple disease burden of silicosis, HIV infection and tuberculosis among the very large population of miners and ex-miners constitutes a public health disaster: the overall mortality rate in ex-miners is 20% higher than that of the general population; white ex-miners had a 62% excess mortality relative to the white general population; ex-miners aged 20–24.9 years had a 79% higher mortality rate than the general population of the same age. There was also a hint of significant administrative underestimation of deaths, while miners working in exclusively gold mines had a greater mortality rate than those working in exclusively platinum mines; both groups had a far greater mortality rate than miners in exclusive coal mines. (Bloch et al. 2018 ). Mining is unhealthy, whether you come from a healthy population (white or younger than 25 years) or one with underlying higher rates of ill health (black community). The combination of silicosis and HIV infection is known to be a potent risk factor for incident tuberculosis among gold miners (Corbett et al. 2000 ), while miners with silicosis have been shown to have higher mortality rates while on tuberculosis treatment than miners without silicosis (Churchyard et al. 2000 ).

Psychological distress levels arising from poor social networks have been noted to contribute to raised levels of mental stress and mental health issues in miners (Considine et al. 2017 ). Chronic stress is a factor in a number of diseases, including anxiety, depression, sleep loss, all leading to poor memory and decision making; it impairs the immune system, increasing susceptibility to infections; it increases blood pressure, heart rate, cholesterol and triglycerides, contributing to heart disease, atherosclerosis, stroke, obesity and diabetes mellitus. On the contrary, good social support is protective (Mariotti 2015 ).

Living conditions have major influences on health. Poverty leads many into small-scale mining and holds them there, in a vicious cycle of limited investment funding leading to dependence on foreign equipment, low productivity and sponsor dependence, which in turn lead to low earnings, exacerbating poverty and unemployment with resulting limited investment funding. And so the cycle continues (Wilson et al. 2015 ).

War also has significant effects on health. As already noted, in the Democratic Republic of Congo militia groups control tantalum mining and trade by brutality, murder and rape (Bell 2014a , b ). Diamonds have fuelled conflict in Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Countries rich in natural resources such as cobalt, coltan, cassiterite, copper and gold are often marred by corruption, authoritarian repression, militarisation and civil war. Rebel groups, governments and mining companies exploit mineral resources, fuelling civil and interstate conflict over control over riches. The local population suffers deprivation, control of food supplies and transport, physical and emotional abuse, as well as social destruction and displacement, with increases in a wide range of diseases, all exacerbated by reduced health care (see Global Policy Forum 2005–2019 and reports therein; Sidel and Levy 2008 ).

Perhaps the greatest pressure on mining is the current economic model that demands profit, seemingly at all costs, from any and every business, large or small. This distorts the three pillars of sustainable development, namely the environment, social equity and economic development (Jarvis et al. 2016 ). The perceived need to enhance shareholders’ return on their investment distorts these equal pillars, with profitability being the “bottom line”, the goal, almost at all costs. Miners, like many other employees in the vast majority of commercial enterprises, suffer as a result.

For example, fatigue is an increasingly relevant concern owing to extended shifts and overtime, driven by this distorted economic model. The implementation of fatigue risk management programs is growing within the mining industry (Wesdock and Arnold 2014 ), a positive result but one that treats the symptoms, not the cause. The International Agency for Research on Cancer has raised concerns about disruption of circadian rhythms through shift work (IARC 2010 ), again, an issue of the symptoms of the distorted economics that put profit above people.

Just over 1 billion people (~ 15% of the world’s population) live in extreme poverty. Most of them are in low- and middle-income countries; economic growth is seen as the clearest path to improving their lot. The size of the necessary growth to achieve this has significant consequences, one of which is an exponential increase in mineral consumption (Rogich and Matos 2008 ). And the need for rare elements for the ubiquitous electronic gadgets of the modern world means that we are all involved in the pressures to increase and improve mining, pressures that continue to disadvantage miners and the poor. Not an encouraging insight.

In Peru, increases in mining activity has been accompanied by fear in local, largely poor, communities that mining projects will contaminate their essential land and water resources. But mining is a significant economic resource in Peru and, as a result, the government has criminalised social protests. Also, some mining and oil extraction companies have exacerbated social stress and tensions by using private security forces, some of which have been accused of violating human rights (Slack 2009 ). Not a good outcome.

Multiple determinants

Few diseases are unifactorial. Pneumoconioses (plural) are a group of dust-induced lung diseases and include coal miner’s pneumoconiosis (black lung disease), asbestosis and silicosis (Mandrioli et al. 2018 ). The incidence of black lung disease amongst coal miners in the USA and Australia has been dropping for a number of years but has recently begun to increase again (Graber et al. 2017 ; Laney et al. 2017 ).

The development of this severe, preventable, but incurable lung disease among miners depends on the type and grade (rank) of coal being mined, type or site of coal mine, chemical composition of dust, fineness of dust, concentration of dust in the air, length of period of exposure and underlying health status of the exposed worker, possibly including specific genes (Gamble et al. 2012 ; Blackley et al. 2014 ; Han et al. 2015 ; Liu et al. 2017 ; Perret et al. 2017 ). Smoking increases the risk of the disease (Altinsoy et al. 2016 ; He et al. 2017 ), while tuberculosis is commoner in miners with a pneumoconiosis (Leung et al. 2012 ; Mo et al. 2013 ; Ngosa and Naidoo 2016 ).

However, the recent increase in the incidence of coal miner’s pneumoconiosis is likely related to a lack of regulation of engineering dust controls in mines, even in high-income countries, despite this being the primary preventative measure, along with good surveillance of the miners (Perret et al. 2017 ). While it is possible that surveillance has improved, thus finding more cases, it is more likely that the dust control is not as good as it should be due to economic drivers for sustaining or increasing profit margins. Certainly, exposure surveillance schemes that rely on industry to police itself alone have often failed owing to economic pressures (Cohen et al. 2016 ).

The current definition of silicosis was adopted internationally in 1930. It gave a major improvement in the recognition of occupational pneumoconioses, but limited the pathogenic effect of silica to pneumoconiosis. This has led to the under-identification of other adverse health outcomes of silica and was due to economic pressures to reduce compensation payments (Rosental 2015 ).

Interventions

Public health advocates prevention and remediation. Work characteristics associated with psychological distress (such as alcohol use, work role and satisfaction, financial factors and job security), vibration, specific occupational disorders (such as musculoskeletal, respiratory and auditory disorders), injury in artisanal mining, as well as dust generation (as noted above, the primary preventive measure), are modifiable (Long et al. 2015 ; Jiménez-Forero et al. 2015 ; Burström et al. 2016 ; Considine et al. 2017 ; Perret et al. 2017 ).

Calls for further action continue to be made throughout the literature, for specific health risks, with specific approaches, in specific countries (see, for example, Hermanus 2007 ; Taylor et al. 2014 ; Singh et al. 2014 ; Kyeremateng-Amoah and Clarke 2015 ; Basu et al. 2015 ; Jiménez-Forero et al. 2015 ; Utembe et al. 2015 ; Zhang et al. 2016 ; Haas and Mattson 2016 ; Considine et al. 2017 ). The case for surveillance, including biomonitoring, to support improved enforcement of health and safety legislation in order to protect both workers and the wider community against the hazards posed by mining activities, is also clear (Nemery et al. 2018 ).

Control measures for multi-factorial risks need to be multi-disciplinary (Mahoney et al. 2015 ). In the Nigerian lead outbreak, control measures included environmental remediation, chelation therapy, public health education and control of mining activities (Dooyema et al. 2012 ). Involvement of miners in the development and deployment of control measures is vital.

Successes have been recorded. For example, noise from earth-moving equipment, blasting, drilling and crushing can have a number of physical effects on health, including raised blood pressure, but noise exposure has been reduced (US mines: Roberts et al. 2017 ). Perhaps the biggest success has been in the reduction in the death rate from accidents in the US coal mining industry, from thousands per year 100 years ago (> 300 deaths per 100,000 miners, 1901–1910) to under 20 per year 2011–2018 (14/100,000) (derived from 1900 to 2018 data in MSHA n.d.). It shows what can be achieved.

Innovative approaches to improve safety and health are being considered. The development of end-of-shift self-assessment tools has the potential to improve engineering monitoring and give better evaluation of control technologies (Cauda et al. 2016 ), at least in high-income countries. Improvements in artisanal miners’ health are more difficult. Quite a challenge.

Insight 4—a volunteer

But I am now retired, escaping from the “rat race” and able to volunteer to support good causes or just do something I enjoy at my own pace. I work on an occasional basis alongside employed sailors to offer a boat service on the nearby lake. I work for free; they work for a wage. It has given me time to consider who pays for miners’ ill health, their exploitation in many (but hopefully not all) situations.

I have recently visited the town of Elliot Lake in Ontario for personal reasons. Elliot Lake was “the uranium capital of the world” in the period from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s (Elliot Lake 2018 ). While the greatly increased mortality from radon-related lung cancer, probably enhanced by arsenic exposure in the gold mining areas, in uranium miners across Ontario has been reported (Kusiak et al. 1993 ), there has been no investigation reported of whether or not there is a risk to the local human communities from mine tailings and the use of mine waste in building materials, although the risk from radon to the ruffed grouse has been assessed around Elliot Lake (Clulow et al. 1992 ). The drinking water content of radon ( 226 Ra) in the town remains below the Canadian maximum acceptable concentration (Chen et al. 2018 ), although the health risk from radon is gaseous, and so soil and rock also need assessing, as does ingress into houses. Indeed, although both the city museum and the local monument to the miners recognise industrial accidents and illness, that is all. No detail, no specifics, no explanation, no deliberation. A similar picture emerges of the many centuries of mining for a wide variety of minerals and elements in the English Lake District, where I now live (Lake District National Park n.d.; Visit Cumbria n.d.). Not a good reflection on health or government leadership.

However, mining brings employment, improves some infrastructure and sometimes health care (Mining Health Initiative 2013 ), possibly education.

But the employment does not always lift people out of the poverty trap (Wilson et al. 2015 ); indeed, employment, even self-employment, is insecure for many (Ssekika 2017 ). Health services for miners and their communities, run in partnerships by government and mining companies, tend to produce mixed results in terms of the health of the community (Stephens and Ahern 2001 ) since they are not addressing the wider causes of the ill health, including economics and the poverty trap. And as for education? How can this improve the lot of child labourers, whose day is spent labouring, supporting both their parents and the mines and therefore unable to attend school (Segawa 2016 )?

I conclude that we all pay for mining. As John Donne (1572–1631) wrote ( For Whom the Bell Tolls ), No man is an island/Entire of itself.

Insight 5—a lay preacher

The Wellcome Trust and Gates Foundation have been chastised for, on the one hand, funding health services while, on the other, investing in fossil fuel companies whose mining operations may have a profound and adverse effect on the local communities (Smith and Carrington 2015 ). I am interested in practical issues around ethics and the reason people make ethical decisions. Our modern way of life cannot do without mining, but—is ethical mining possible or do we accept as inevitable the cost of miners’ poor health? Can ethical mining improve miners’ health? Will it lead to decreased profits?

Exploitation takes place outside the realms of international agreements such as the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development ( http://www.un.org/documents/ga/conf151/aconf15126-1annex1.htm ). Ultimately the polluter is the purchaser of goods and services at a rate which does not include fair wages and clean up (or prevention) of pollution. We all need to act.

The reconciliation of the varied, and sometimes competing, interests of the individual, society, business and the state through individual choice, government responsibility, business profit and corporate social responsibility is fraught with difficulties (Krebs 2008 ; Benton 2018 ). There are many underlying ethical theories: Aristotle’s virtue ethics focuses on the moral character of the agent, Immanuel Kant’s on doing right from a sense of duty, John Stuart Mill’s considers the balance of harm and benefit to the individual and society from actions (Ortmann et al. 2016 ), and there are several others. Ethical approaches that are not underpinned by explicit theory can be rightly criticised (Kar-Purkayastha 2009 ). As a Christian lay preacher my own ethics are based on the words of Jesus, “Love God, love your neighbour as yourself” (Bible, Matthew 22:39). Not an approach without challenges. Or possibilities. This paper is one of my responses.

But mining companies can improve health (Davey 2018 ). For example, corporate social responsibility (Meier et al. 2014) in Zambian copper and nickel mining, encouraged by the financial backers, has resulted in improved health in children and women living near the mines, although, yet again, the poor have disproportionally lost out (Knoblauch et al. 2017 , 2018 ).

Conclusions

As noted nearly 20 years ago, “Mining remains one of the most hazardous occupations in the world…” (Stephens and Ahern 2001 ). Donoghue wrote ( 2004 ), “… although substantial progress has been made …, there remains room for further risk reduction…”, words that are as true now as then. Continuing increased reductions in risk and exposure that would improve the health of miners in a sustainable way to benefit the miners, their families and the rest of the world are still urgently needed and are touched on in many papers (e.g. Basu et al. 2015 ; Jiménez-Forero et al. 2015 ; Kyeremateng-Amoah and Clarke 2015 ; Long et al. 2015 ; Liao et al. 2016 ; Considine et al. 2017 ; Perret et al. 2017 ).

But academics need to work in partnership: with communities, government and industry, to develop multi-disciplinary, evidence-based solutions to the issues around mining resources, health and sustainable development (Maier et al. 2014 ). Employment, health, economic stability and environmental protection need not be mutually exclusive (Woodward and Hales 2014 ).

We all have a part to play in that.

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Stewart, A.G. Mining is bad for health: a voyage of discovery. Environ Geochem Health 42 , 1153–1165 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10653-019-00367-7

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Mining the built environment: telling the story of urban mining.

1. Introduction

2. research methodology, 3. industrial ecology and urban metabolism, the role of material stock in industrial ecology research, 4. urban mining, 4.1. materials under study, 4.2. urban mining benefits, 4.3. the methodological framework for urban mining, 4.3.1. the top-down mfa, 4.3.2. the bottom-up mfa, 4.4. the evolution of urban mining research, 4.5. overcoming methodological limitations, 4.5.1. bottom-up mfa and material intensity coefficients (mics), 4.5.2. material compartments’ physical parameters in bottom-up methods, 4.6. future research and new technologies, author contributions, conflicts of interest.

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Purpose	Geographical Scope and Materials	Methodological Approach	Forecasting Model	Examples
Forecasting and comparing future input and output flows. Recycling and recovery rates and policy and management systems are reoccurring themes.	Geographical scale: national and global. Materials: metals, construction aggregates, and plastic.	Top-down retrospective dynamic flow analysis is commonly used, unlike a bottom-up analysis.	Yes	[ , , , ]
Studies the evolution of stocks and flows over time. Forecasting and comparing future input and output flows, e.g., demand for metals.	Geographical scale: national and global. Materials: metals, construction aggregates.	Top-down retrospective dynamic flow analysis.	Yes	[ , , , ]
Examines the correlation between GHG emissions, energy demand, and material stocks. Global climate change and natural disasters are also reoccurring topics	Geographical scale: regional, national, and global. Materials: metals, construction aggregates, and wood.	Top-down retrospective stock analysis.	Yes, especially energy demand and scenario-based forecasting.	[ , , , ]
Estimating material stock for future exploitation	Geographical scale: urban and regional. Materials: metals, construction aggregates, and wood.	Bottom-up static stock analysis and occasionally a retrospective dynamic analysis are performed.	No, instead, some studies estimate the demolition curve.	[ , , , ]

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Aldebei, F.; Dombi, M. Mining the Built Environment: Telling the Story of Urban Mining. Buildings 2021 , 11 , 388. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings11090388

Aldebei F, Dombi M. Mining the Built Environment: Telling the Story of Urban Mining. Buildings . 2021; 11(9):388. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings11090388

Aldebei, Faisal, and Mihály Dombi. 2021. "Mining the Built Environment: Telling the Story of Urban Mining" Buildings 11, no. 9: 388. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings11090388

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ENCYCLOPEDIC ENTRY

Mining extracts useful materials from the earth. Although mining provides many valuable minerals, it can also harm people and the environment.

Anthropology, Archaeology, Earth Science, Geology

Open-Pit Copper Mine

Throughout history, minerals, like copper, have been extracted from the earth for human use. It is still mined in places like this open-pit mine outside of Silver City, New Mexico, in the United States.

Photograph by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Mining is the process of extracting useful materials from the earth. Some examples of substances that are mined include coal, gold, or iron ore . Iron ore is the material from which the metal iron is produced.

The process of mining dates back to prehistoric times. Prehistoric people first mined flint, which was ideal for tools and weapons since it breaks into shards with sharp edges. The mining of gold and copper also dates back to prehistoric times.

These profitable substances that are mined from the earth are called minerals . A mineral is typically an inorganic substance that has a specific chemical composition and crystal structure. The minerals are valuable in their pure form, but in the earth they are mixed with other, unwanted rocks and minerals . This mix of rock and minerals is usually carried away from the mine together, then later processed and refined to isolate the desired mineral .

The two major categories of modern mining include surface mining and underground mining. In surface mining, the ground is blasted so that ores near Earth’s surface can be removed and carried to refineries to extract the minerals. Surface mining can be destructive to the surrounding landscape, leaving huge open pits behind. In underground mining, ores are removed from deep within the earth. Miners blast tunnels into the rock to reach the ore deposits. This process can lead to accidents that trap miners underground.

Along with accidents, a career in mining can also be dangerous since it can lead to health problems. Breathing in dust particles produced by mining can lead to lung disease. One of the most common forms is black lung disease, which is caused when coal miners breathe in coal dust. Many other types of mining produce silica dust, which causes a disease similar to black lung disease. These are incurable diseases that cause breathing impairment and can be fatal.

The mining process can also harm the environment in other ways. Mining creates a type of water pollution known as acid mine drainage . First, mining exposes sulfides in the soil. When the rainwater or streams dissolves the sulfides, they form acids . This acidic water damages aquatic plants and animals. Along with acid mine drainage , the disposal of mine waste can also cause severe water pollution from toxic metals. The toxic metals commonly found in mine waste, such as arsenic and mercury, are harmful to the health of people and wildlife if they are released into nearby streams.

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Published: 24 May 2024

The environmental impacts and sustainable pathways of the global diamond industry

Yutong Sun 1 , 2 ,
Shangrong Jiang 3 &
Shouyang Wang ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5773-998X 1 , 2 , 4

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume 11 , Article number: 671 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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Environmental studies
Social policy

Mining diamond poses significant and potentially underestimated risks to the environment worldwide. Here, we propose a Diamond Environmental Impacts Estimation (DEIE) model to forecast the environmental indicators, including greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, mineral waste, and water usage of the diamond industry from 2030 to 2100 in the top diamond production countries under different Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs). The DEIE projection results indicate that the annual GHG emissions, mineral waste, and water usage of the global diamond industry will reach 9.65 Mt, 422.80 Mt, and 78.68 million m 3 under the SSP1-1.9 scenario, and 13.26 Mt, 582.84 Mt, and 107.95 million m 3 under the SSP2-2.6 scenario in 2100, respectively. We analyze the environmental impact heterogeneities and the associated driving factors across the major diamond production countries identified by our DEIE framework. In addition, we find that lab-grown diamonds can reduce annual GHG emissions, mineral waste, and water usage by 9.58 Mt, 421.06 Mt, and 66.70 million m 3 in 2100. The lab-grown diamond substitution policy can annually save 714 million cubic meters of landfill space, harvest 255 million kilograms of rice, feed 436 million people, and lift 1.19 million households out of hunger. The lab-grown diamond substitution policy could contribute to the diamond industry’s GHG mitigation and sustainability efforts in a cost-saving manner.

Managing urban development could halve nitrogen pollution in China

Potential for future reductions of global GHG and air pollutants from circular waste management systems

Transparency on greenhouse gas emissions from mining to enable climate change mitigation

Introduction.

In 2019, the global diamond industry achieved a significant production volume of 135.8 million carats and a market size of $89.18 billion (Bain and Company, 2014 ). This industry is on a trajectory to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3.0% in the next ten years, primarily fueled by the burgeoning demand for jewelry in emerging economies, particularly in Asia Pacific regions such as China and India (Pereira et al. 2019 ). Traditional diamond mining has raised considerable environmental concerns. It relies on heavy machinery, explosives, and hydraulic equipment to extract diamonds (Tatiya, 2005 ), a process that yields a staggering 57,000 grams of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, produces 2.63 tonnes of mineral waste, and consumes 0.48 m 3 of water per carat (Frost and Sullivan, 2014 ). In contrast, the rise of lab-grown diamonds represents a vital shift towards environmental sustainability. These diamonds, which boast similar physical, chemical, and optical properties to their mined counterparts (Frank et al. 1973 ), are produced at a fraction of the environmental cost. Specifically, when utilizing clean energy sources, lab-grown diamonds result in a mere 0.028 grams of GHG emissions, 0.0006 tonnes of mineral waste, and 0.07 m³ of water usage per carat. This stark contrast underscores the potential for lab-grown diamonds to significantly mitigate the environmental impact associated with diamond production (Frost and Sullivan, 2014 ). Given the pressing need for effective climate change mitigation strategies, which includes transitioning towards low-carbon systems (Geels, 2018 ; Zhang et al. 2022 ; Chen, 2021 ; Wang et al. 2021 ; Cheng, 2020 ), in this paper, we estimate the environmental footprints of the global diamond mining industry, as well as the environmental impacts of lab-grown diamonds on sustainable operations of the diamond industry.

Utilizing the diamond production data and the associated economic parameters from 1970 to 2020, this paper proposes a new Diamond Environmental Impacts Estimation (DEIE) model to estimate the environmental impacts of the diamond industry by introducing three environmental assessment indicators, including GHG emissions, mineral waste, and water usage output. Our DEIE model estimates the diamond industry production of the top 5 diamond-producing countries and other countries, namely Australia, Russia, Botswana, The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo), and South Africa. Given the environmental impact estimation results of the top diamond-producing countries, this paper evaluates the GHG footprint, mineral waste, and water usage of the diamond industry in top diamond-producing countries from 2030 to 2100 and the potential sustainable effectiveness of lab-grown diamond substitution policy under different Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs).

Shared Socio-economic Pathways are widely used scenarios that provide different plausible futures for human societies, each with varying degrees of challenges and opportunities for mitigating climate change (Greve et al. 2018 ; Zhang et al. 2023 ; Sardain et al. 2019 ; Pan et al. 2017 ). These pathways are often combined with Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) to explore the effects of different emissions trajectories on the climate (Kriegler et al. 2012 ). Combined SSPs with RCPs (SSP-RCP) allow multiple assumptions about ambitions to mitigate climate change, resulting in differing emissions within the same general socio-economic narrative (Pan et al. 2017 ; Kriegler et al. 2014 ). This approach is also widely used in current sustainable development research. For example, Cammarano et al. (Cammarano et al. 2022 ). illustrate that the global production of processing tomatoes in the main production areas will decrease by 6% by 2050 based on the SSP-RCP. Estoque et al. (Estoque et al. 2019 ). consider the five SSPs to portray a range of plausible futures for the region’s forests, employing a state-of-the-art land change modelling procedure and remotely sensed data. Tang et al. (Tang et al. 2022 ). point out that carbon mitigation costs can be more than offset by health co-benefits in 2050, bringing a net benefit of 393–3017 billion USD (in 2017 USD value) under the SSP1-1.9. Cui et al. (Cui et al. 2022 ). predict the emissions of 59 countries (excluding China and India) with emissions growing faster than the global average under different SSPs. He et al. (He et al. 2023 ). analyze the constrained future brightening of solar radiation and its implication for China’s solar power under the SSP1-2.6, the SSP2-4.5, and the SSP5-8.5.

In our research, we employ the SSP-RCP framework to assess the sustainability of lab-grown diamonds as alternatives to mined diamonds within the diamond industry. Specifically, we consider two socio-economic pathways: the SSP1-1.9, which outlines a scenario enabling society to meet the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping global warming well below 2 °C, aiming for 1.5 °C (Rogelj et al. 2016 ), and the SSP2-2.6, which represents a pathway with moderate challenges to both mitigation and adaptation efforts (Hofmann et al. 2019 ). One of the primary reasons for selecting the SSP1-1.9 and the SSP2-2.6 to assess the sustainability of lab-grown diamonds is their varied challenges and opportunities in addressing climate change. The SSP1-1.9, a low-emission scenario, anticipates a sustainable future through a shift to renewable energy, enhanced resource efficiency (Yang et al. 2023 ), and increased investments in sustainable development (Purohit et al. 2022 ). Conversely, the SSP2-2.6 foresees continued emission growth (Stegmann et al. 2022 ), albeit slower, focusing more on adapting to climate change impacts than reducing emissions.

In the contexts of the SSP1-1.9 and the SSP2-2.6, the diamond industry may undergo a series of fundamental changes reflecting responses to environmental protection and sustainability trends. Under the SSP1-1.9 scenario, the diamond industry is expected to shift towards more sustainable practices. Due to their lower environmental impact, lab-grown diamonds may gain a larger market share, especially among consumer groups that are more sensitive to sustainable production methods. Moreover, there will be an increased global demand for transparency and ethical standards regarding the origin of diamonds, prompting the industry to adopt more responsible measures. In this scenario, the transformation of the diamond industry will focus on reducing environmental impacts while meeting the growing consumer demand for ethics and sustainability. Under the SSP2-2.6 scenario, changes in the diamond industry might be more moderate. Technological advancements will focus on improving mining efficiency and reducing resource waste but may not be as rapid or comprehensive as in the SSP1-1.9 scenario. The acceptance of lab-grown diamonds will also increase, but mined diamonds will still maintain their market position, especially in the high-end market. The diamond industry may see more influence from investors focused on environmental and social governance (ESG), driving the industry towards more sustainable mining and trading practices. By applying our Diamond Environmental Impacts Estimation (DEIE) model under the SSP1-1.9 and the SSP2-2.6 scenarios, we aim to forecast the environmental impacts of the diamond industry from 2030 to 2100 in a standard and comparative manner. Our analysis sheds light on lab-grown diamonds’ effectiveness in steering the diamond industry towards a more sustainable future.

According to the DEIE projection results, the global diamond industry is expected to have significantly higher annual GHG emissions, mineral waste, and water usage under the SSP2-2.6 compared to the SSP1-1.9 in 2100. Specifically, the annual GHG emissions are projected to increase from 9.65 Mt to 13.26 Mt, marking a 37.4% increase from the SSP1-1.9 to the SSP2-2.6. Mineral waste is projected to increase from 422.80 Mt to 582.84 Mt, representing a 38% increase from the SSP1-1.9 to the SSP2-2.6. Water usage is also projected to increase from 78.68 million m 3 to 107.95 million m 3 , indicating a 37.2% increase from the SSP1-1.9 to the SSP2-2.6. These projections highlight the potential environmental challenges associated with the continued growth of the diamond industry under a more moderate challenge to both mitigation and adaptation scenarios (the SSP2-2.6) compared to a low-emissions scenario (the SSP1-1.9). Specifically, the DEIE projection framework indicates that Botswana’s GHG emissions under the SSP2-2.6 are 3.19 million tons (Mt) in 2100, accounting for 48.92% of local production-based GHG emissions in 2020 Footnote 1 Footnote 2 in 2010 (49.4 Mt) (Tugov, 2013 ). Under the SSP2-2.6, the annual mineral waste of Botswana’s diamond industry will reach 114.42 Mt in 2100, four times higher than that of French municipal waste (Senthilkumar et al. 2014 ). DEIE emphasizes that the water consumption of the diamond industry in Botswana and DR Congo can reach 26.90 million m 3 (2100) and 26.75 million m 3 (2100), respectively.

This paper also examines the sustainable pathway and potential sustainable effectiveness of lab-grown diamonds as a substitute for natural diamonds. In 2100, the use of lab-grown diamonds can potentially reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 9.58 Mt and decrease mineral waste by 421.06 Mt. At the international level, the reduced mineral waste exceeds twice total municipal waste of China in 2018 (203 Mt) (Qu et al. 2019 ; Mi et al. 2020 ). This reduction in mineral waste can save 714 million cubic meters of landfill space, Footnote 3 produce 255 million kilograms of rice, Footnote 4 feed 436 million people Footnote 5 , and prevent hunger for 1.19 million households in one year. Besides, the water resources saved by lab-grown diamonds could exceed 10 million m 3 . In addition, the initial cost of lab-grown diamonds is one-third that of mined diamonds, and the final product cost is 42% less (Rrustemi and Tuchschmid, 2020 ). Thus, promoting the substitution of lab-grown diamonds for natural diamonds can support the diamond industry’s sustainability efforts by reducing costs (Smith et al. 2010 ). The development of the lab-grown diamond industry can be considered a green innovation that improves human well-being while minimizing harm to the environment.

The contributions of this study lie in the following aspects. Firstly, this paper introduces the manufacturing processes of natural and lab-grown diamonds and presents a DEIE model that explicitly evaluates the environmental impact associated with each process. Secondly, under Shared Social Economic Pathways (SSPs) and Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs), this paper projects the GHG emissions, mineral waste, and water usage associated with mined diamonds in different regions from 2030 to 2100 under the SSP1-1.9 and the SSP2-2.6 scenarios. Thirdly, this article presents four scenarios that reflect differences in future economic levels and lab-grown diamond market share and examines the environmental benefits of lab-grown diamonds under each scenario. Fourthly, this study emphasizes the importance of considering sustainability in decision-making processes in the diamond industry and highlights the potential benefits of using lab-grown diamonds as an eco-friendly alternative to natural diamonds.

Construction of diamond environmental impacts estimation (DEIE) database

The Diamond Environmental Impacts Estimation model uses the World Mineral Statistics (WMS) archive data ( https://www2.bgs.ac.uk/mineralsUk/statistics/ ) developed by the British Geological Survey to estimate the worldwide, country-based, and time-varying diamond industry environmental impacts. Since the WMS archive data are generated and verified by regularly exchanging information with geological survey organizations, minerals bureaus, and other related official and commercial entities, the WMS raw data quality is assured and robust for DEIE diamond historical environmental impact data construction. Given the diamond industry production data availability of World Mineral Statistics (WMS) archive data, we collect the worldwide country-based diamond historical production data from 1970 to 2020.

As demonstrated in Supplementary Table 1 in supplementary information , we list the top 5 diamond-producing countries around the world during our DEIE sample period, namely Australia, Russia, Botswana, DR Congo, and South Africa. As of 2020, the top 5 diamond production countries contribute to 73% of the world’s total annual diamond production, whereas Australia, Russia, Botswana, DR Congo, and South Africa produce 911, 890, 846, 588, and 485 million Carats, respectively. In this paper, the DEIE model regards the top 5 diamond-producing countries and other countries’ historical production data as input. Then we calculate the projected diamond industry GHG emissions, mineral waste disposed or stored and water usage. In addition, we collect the lab-grown diamond market share from statista.com to obtain the annual diamond production data of our DEIE modelling. ( https://www.statista.com/statistics/1076048/ global-market-share-of-lab-grown-diamonds/ ).

The associated greenhouse gas emissions of the diamond industry consist of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), methane (CH 4 ), nitrous oxide (N 2 O) fluorinated gases, and hydrofluorocarbons. In DEIE, greenhouse gas is represented by carbon dioxide equivalent (CO 2 -eq), converting other pollutants to CO 2 to standardize the climate impact of diamond production activity. The water usage includes potable and non-potable water. As suggested by previous works by Imperial College London and Frost & Sullivan (Frost and Sullivan, 2014 ), we claim the carbon dioxide equivalent (CO 2 -eq) per carat (kg/carat), mineral waste (tons/carat), and water usage (m 3 /carat) for both mined and lab-grown diamonds in Supplementary Table 2 from the supplementary information . In sum, the total environmental indicators, including GHG emissions (evaluated in CO 2 -eq), mineral waste, and water usage of worldwide diamond production activity, are formulated as follows:

Where ${{EI}}_{j,t}$ refers to the global environmental indicator j in time t , where the environmental indicators consist of GHG emission (CO 2 -eq), mineral waste and water usage. ${I}_{j,m}$ , ${I}_{j,l}$ are the corresponding intensity of three environmental indicators for mined and lab-grown diamonds respectively. The environmental indicator estimation time span $N$ of this paper is from 1970 to 2020. ${M}_{i,t}$ , ${L}_{i,t}$ are the annual mined and lab-grown diamond production amount of country $i$ in year t respectively, where the country indicators are divided into Australia, Russia, Botswana, DR Congo, South Africa, and other countries.

Diamond environmental impacts estimation

Following the standard industrial GHG emission estimation and projection literature, we estimate the global diamond industry production and the associated environmental indicators based on long-term socio-economic projections. Developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), long-term socio-economic projections provide the country-level GDP and population projections from the so-called Shared Socio-Economic Pathways (SSP). By estimating diamond industry GHG emissions based on GDP and population historical data, our estimation results are compared to other environmental impact estimation and projection papers. Hence, we obtain the country-level GDP and population data from the World Bank dataset ( https://data.worldbank.org/ ), which consists of the GDP and population of Australia, Botswana, Canada, DR Congo, South Africa, and the rest of the world. Given the historical diamond industry GHG emission derived from the above section, the emission data are regressed by country-level GDP and population data from the period of 1970 to 2020. We thus run the specifications as follows:

Equation ( 2 ) serves as the foundation for evaluating the environmental impact attributable to the diamond industry across different nations over time. Specifically, ${{EI}}_{i,j,t}$ represents the annual estimated environmental indicators for country $i$ in year $t$ , where the environmental indicators encompass carbon dioxide equivalents (CO 2 -eq), mineral waste, and water usage. These indicators are crucial for understanding the environmental footprint of diamond mining and processing activities. ${{GDP}}_{i,t}$ and ${{POP}}_{i,t}$ denote the gross domestic product and population of country $i$ in year $t$ , respectively, highlighting the economic and demographic dimensions influencing environmental outcomes. The coefficients ${\alpha }_{i,j}$ , ${\beta }_{i,j}$ , and ${\gamma }_{i,j}$ quantify the relationship between the historical environmental indicators and the explanatory variables of GDP and population, offering insights into how economic growth and population dynamic are associated with environmental impacts in the context of the diamond industry. The error term, ${\varepsilon }_{i,j,t}$ , captures unobserved factors that might affect the estimated environmental indicators. By running the above regression specifications, we obtain the estimated coefficients ${\hat{\alpha }}_{i,j}$ , ${\hat{\beta }}_{i,j}$ , and ${\hat{\gamma }}_{i,j}$ to predict the future environmental indicators related to the diamond industry in the next section.

To assess the difference between real historical behaviors and DEIE modelling estimations, the reality and statistical test are performed by comparing the estimated data with historical time-series. The annual carbon emission time-series data of mined diamond production amount from the period of 1970 to 2020 are utilized to verify the parameter consistencies of DEIE modelling. We introduce R 2 to interpret the goodness of fit and parameter consistencies of DEIE modelling. As suggested by the previous studies (Oliva, 2003 ; Summers et al. 2011 ), the reality and statistical results are generally considered to be acceptable if the R 2 is greater than 0.9. We report the results in Supplementary Fig. 1 from supplementary information , where all the R 2 of our DEIE modelling estimations are greater than 0.9 for our sample countries, i.e., the proposed DEIE modelling has significant consistencies with actual diamond industry time-series data.

Future environmental impacts of the diamond industry

As mentioned above, developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Shared Socio-Economic Pathways (SSP) provide the standard and comparative projections of GDP and population to the year 2100. We follow the SSP scenario developed by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) ( https://tntcat.iiasa.ac.at/ ). In addition, the energy consumption projections are derived from the SSP and Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) integrated assessment scenarios. Previous works also provide the possible combinations of SSPs and RCPs by calculating the mitigation costs to achieve the carbon reduction targets based on socio-economic projections. As a result, we follow the frequently used combinations (the SSP1-1.9 and the SSP2-2.6) for our diamond industry environmental impact projections.

Equation ( 3 ) outlines the methodology for projecting environmental indicators related to the diamond industry, incorporating future socio-economic scenarios. Specifically, ${{PEI}}_{i,j,k,t}$ symbolizes the projected environmental impacts for country $i$ in year $t$ , under socio-economic scenario k , encompassing projections of GHG emissions, mineral waste, and water usage associated with diamond extraction and processing. These projections are based on the regressed parameters ${\hat{\alpha }}_{i,j}$ , ${\hat{\beta }}_{i,j}$ , and ${\hat{\gamma }}_{i,j}$ derived from Eq. ( 2 ), thereby ensuring a cohesive analytical framework. The socio-economic scenarios, represented by k (e.g., the SSP1-1.9 or the SSP2-2.6), provide a structured approach to anticipate changes in GHG emissions, mineral waste, and water consumption from 2030 to 2100, considering various pathways of socio-economic development. ${{GDP}}_{i,k,t}$ and ${{POP}}_{i,k,t}$ indicate the projected GDP and population of country $i$ in year $t$ under socio-economic scenario k . The projection period for the diamond GHG emissions, mineral waste, and water usage is from 2030 to 2100. In terms of evaluating the environmental impact reduction effectiveness of the lab-grown diamond substitution policy, the projected lab-grown diamond market share is obtained by the historical lab-grown market growth in the previous section. We claim a regular substitution speed and an upgrade speed that the lab-grown diamond market share growth rate is doubled to evaluate the GHG emission reduction effectiveness of lab-grown diamond substitution policy.

Diamond industry environmental impacts evaluation

Figure 1 presents the diamond production flowchart to theoretically illustrate the environmental impacts of both mined and lab-grown diamonds. Mined diamonds and lab-grown diamonds have distinct production routes. Mined diamonds typically go through eight stages, including exploration, mining, ore processing, cleaning, sorting, packaging, and sales of rough diamonds (Meyer and Seal, 2018 ).

The blue section represents the production process of natural diamonds, which consists of eight different processes: Exploration, mining, ore processing, cleaning, sorting, packaging, and sales of rough diamonds. Both natural and lab-grown diamonds need to be cut and polished (marked in yellow) and sold as gemstones (sales of gemstones). The green section illustrates the two different methods used to produce diamonds in the laboratory, namely High Temperature and Pressure (HTHP) and Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD). The final step in this flow chart (in grey) is closure and rehabilitation, as the stones may eventually be subject to after-sales requirements such as repair or cleaning.

Currently, there are two environmentally friendly production methods for lab-grown diamonds. The first is the High-Pressure High-Temperature (HTHP) system, where seed crystals are placed in pure graphitic carbon, exposed to a temperature of about 1500 °C and pressurized to about 1.5 million pounds per square inch in a chamber (Zeng et al. 2022 ). The second method is known as Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD), which involves placing seeds in a sealed chamber filled with a carbon-rich gas and heating it to around 800 °C (Fan et al. 2018 ).

Meyer and Seal (Meyer and Seal, 2018 ) emphasize that diamond mining requires an entire factor more energy to extract an underground diamond from Earth than to create one above ground, which contributes to environmental deterioration. Mining poses significant and potentially underestimated risks to tropical forests worldwide (Sonter et al. 2017 ). In Brazil’s Amazon, mining drives deforestation far beyond operational lease boundaries (Sonter et al. 2017 ). Also, mining threatens species diversity (Sonter et al. 2020 ). However, unlike mined diamonds, lab-grown diamonds are produced inside machines that simulate the internal state of the earth rather than existing on the earth (Kim et al. 2011 ). As a result, diamond producers can use clean energy to produce diamonds instead of fuel oil to generate electricity. In addition to the convenience of using clean energy, lab-grown diamonds also avoid mineral waste generated in the mining process, such as gangue, wall rock, tailings, etc (Ashfold et al. 2020 ). In the production of lab-grown diamonds, water use is reduced by eliminating panning. Studies show that using clean energy for lab-grown diamonds results in 0.028 g of emissions, 0.0006 t of mineral waste, and 0.07 m 3 of water per carat, compared to mining’s 57 kg of GHG emissions, 2.63 t of mineral waste, and 0.48 m 3 of water per carat (Frost and Sullivan, 2014 ).

Our Diamond Environmental Impacts Estimation (DEIE) assesses greenhouse gas emissions, mineral waste, and water usage in diamond mining. The associated greenhouse gas emissions of the diamond industry consist of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), methane (CH 4 ), nitrous oxide (N 2 O) fluorinated gases, and hydrofluorocarbons. By analyzing historical data, we estimate the above factors for the top 5 diamond-producing countries (Australia, Russia, Botswana, DR Congo, South Africa) from 1970 to 2020. These countries accounted for 73% of the global diamond output in 2020, with production figures of 911, 867, 846, 588, and 485 million carats, respectively.

Figure 2 presents a comparison of the environmental impacts between the diamond industry and other metal industries, namely gold, nickel, aluminum, and iron. Compared to other metal industries, the diamond industry’s GHG emissions, mineral waste generation, and water usage per ton of production are significantly higher. As shown in Fig. 2 , the GHG emissions produced by one ton of diamond production are twice that of gold and 30,000 times that of iron ore. The difference between diamond mining and other metals in mineral waste generation is more substantial. After standardizing the unit, the mineral waste generated by diamonds disposed or stored is up to 2 Mt, while other metals are less than 10 tons. The mineral waste created by mining one ton of diamonds equals the waste generated by mining 105 Mt of nickel. The abundance of mineral waste is caused by the unique diamond mining method. Specifically, in open-pit mining, miners need to find the geological structure of the Kimberley pipe (Field et al. 2008 ), a funnel-shaped rock pipe extending deep into the earth, to extract diamonds. The Kimberley Pipe is deep and ancient, so it is often found beneath overburden (such as sand and soil), and in some cases, over 1 kilometre (km) below ground (Cui et al. 2022 ). That is to say, a large amount of surplus waste rock, sand, soil, and processed kimberlite can accumulate in the immediate vicinity of such areas. In addition, coastal and inland alluvial mining, and marine mining also require mining companies to remove sand and soil before mining (Field et al. 2008 ; Wang et al. 2016 ). The total water consumption of diamond mining operations, including potable water and non-potable water, shows that producing the same unit of rough diamonds requires 1.92 times more water than gold and 52,345 times more water than bauxite and alumina. The total water consumption for diamond production includes using fresh water in mining activities and water for diamond cleaning. Water availability is essential for agriculture (Lu et al. 2015 ), thus the demand and market expansion of diamonds will lead to a more severe environmental impact on the global diamond industry compared to its current circumstances (Maconachie and Binns, 2007 ).

a – c show the comparative results of the global average environmental impacts of mining one ton of rough diamonds and one ton of other metals (Gan and Griffin, 2018 ; Yellishetty et al. 2008 ; Jiang and Xu, 2017 ; Kusin et al. 2019 ). Selected metals include iron ore, gold, bauxite, alumina, and nickel. a – c distinguish GHG emissions (tons), mineral waste disposed or stored (tons), and both potable and non-potable water usage (m 3 ) in the environmental indicators category by blue (GHG emissions), purple (mineral waste) and green (water usage), respectively.

Diamond industry environmental impacts projection

This paper outlines two scenarios, the SSP1-1.9 and the SSP2-2.6, blending socioeconomic developments with climate policy goals through Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) and Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs). In studying the future changes in the diamond industry under these scenarios, we focus on the role of technological advancements in reducing the energy consumption and resource waste associated with diamond mining. Advanced exploration technologies can minimize surface damage, and automation enhances mining efficiency. These advancements are expected to be evident in the SSP1-1.9. Secondly, considering the varying degrees of dependence on natural resources among different countries, national resource constraints also become a significant factor affecting natural diamond mining. In resource-rich countries, technological progress helps utilize these resources more efficiently while reducing environmental damage. However, in countries with limited resources, especially under the SSP2-2.6, technological innovation is equally crucial but may focus more on the development of lab-grown diamonds to alleviate reliance on natural diamond resources.

We forecast GHG emissions, mineral waste, and water usage in the diamond mining sector from 2030 to 2100 under the SSP1-1.9 and the SSP2-2.6. While mining traditionally depends more on historical than social factors, leading to the use of autoregressive models for ore prediction, these require high autocorrelation coefficients. To improve the prediction accuracy and combine different scenarios of SSPs, this study examines different variables contained in SSPs related to diamond production and finds suitable factors as regression parameters, the regression process is illustrated in the methods section. The prediction results are presented in Fig. 3 . The SSPs provide various variables for five regions, namely ASIA, LAM, MAF, OECD, and REF, from 2030 to 2100. Australia is a member of the OECD, Russia belongs to the REF, and Botswana, Congo, and South Africa are part of the MAF region.

a – f represent GHG emissions projections under the assumptions of the SSP1-1.9 (blue) and the SSP2-2.6 (red); g – l exhibit mineral waste disposed or stored projection under the SSP1-1.9 (green) and the SSP2-2.6 (orange); m – r show both potable and non-potable water usage projection of the SSP1-1.9 (purple) and the SSP2-2.6 (yellow). All projections are presented with shaded confidence intervals. Each data is presented as mean values ± standard error of the mean (SEM) based on 95% confidence intervals calculated by two-tailed t -tests ( p < 0.05). The selected regions include Australia ( a , g , m ); Russia ( b , h , n ); Botswana ( c , i , o ); DR Congo ( d , j , p ); South Africa ( e , k , q ) and Others ( f , l , r ). The horizontal coordinates present years from 2030 to 2100 and the vertical coordinates for GHG emissions and mineral waste are millions of tones; vertical coordinates for water usage are millions of m 3 .

DEIE projection results (Fig. 3 ) indicate the annual GHG emissions, mineral waste and water usage of the global diamond industry will reach 9.65 Mt, 422.80 Mt, and 78.68 million m 3 under the SSP1-1.9 scenario; 13.26 Mt, 582.84 Mt and 107.95 million m 3 under the SSP2-2.6 scenario in 2100 respectively. We find environmental impact heterogeneities across the major diamond production countries. Specifically, the Australian diamond mining industry is projected to emit 1.70 Mt in 2030 under the SSP1-1.9, peaking at 1.86 Mt in 2070, before declining to 1.74 Mt in 2100. According to the forecast results, the GHG emissions of the diamond mining industry in Australia in 2070 will exceed the total GHG emissions of Mozambique in 2019 (Friedlingstein et al. 2019 ; Liu et al. 2022 ). Similar to the SSP1-1.9, the GHG emissions of the SSP2-2.6 in Australia peaks in 2070 (1.82 Mt), then decreases to 1.77 Mt in 2100. The DEIE forecasting result in 2070 is higher than the total emissions of the Sudanese construction sector in 2019 (Cui et al. 2022 ). In comparison to the Australian diamond mining industry, GHG emissions in Russia showed a downward trend. Its emissions will decrease year by year from 1.70 Mt in 2030 to 1.12 Mt under the SSP1-1.9. The downward trend of emissions in the SSP2-2.6 scenario is relatively gentle, and the difference between 2100 and 2030 is 0.24 Mt. Despite the downward trend, under the scenario of moderate challenges to both mitigation and adaptation to environmental problems, the GHG emissions of Russia’s diamond mining industry in 2100 will also be 1.4 Mt.

GHG emissions from diamonds in Botswana, DR Congo, and South Africa vary considerably depending on the scenario assumptions. The DEIE model shows that Botswana’s GHG emissions reach 2.44 Mt peak under the SSP1-1.9 in 2080, accounting for 59.51% of its GHG emissions in the electricity and heat sector in 2020 (Friedlingstein et al. 2019 ). Under the SSP2-2.6 scenario, Botswana’s GHG emissions will increase year by year from 1.91 Mt in 2030 to 3.19 Mt in 2100. In this scenario, the emissions in 2100 account for 48.92% of Botswana’s production-based carbon emissions in 2020, which is larger than the local agriculture, transportation, manufacturing & construction, and building sectors in 2019 (Friedlingstein et al. 2019 ). The DEIE model reveals that Botswana’s GHG emissions from diamond mining in 2100 will match the total emissions of its building sector from 2009 to 2019. Similarly, DR Congo’s emissions trend under the SSP1-1.9 peaks at 2.43 Mt in 2080, nearly matching its total 2020 CO 2 emissions. Under the SSP2-2.6, DR Congo’s emissions will rise from 1.90 Mt in 2030 to 3.18 Mt in 2100, exceeding its 2020 emissions by 0.7 Mt (Liu et al. 2022 ; Friedlingstein et al. 2020 ). High GHG emissions pose a significant risk to Botswana and DR Congo, threatening environmental and developmental sustainability. South Africa’s diamond mining GHG emissions are projected to be 1.15 Mt by 2080 under the SSP1-1.9 and increase to 1.50 Mt by 2100 under the SSP2-2.6. Emissions from diamond mining in other areas have been decreasing annually since 2030 under both scenarios, indicating a future concentration of the diamond industry in major mining countries like Botswana and DR Congo.

In both the SSP1-1.9 and the SSP2-2.6 scenarios, the mineral waste from Australia’s diamond mining increases initially, peaking in 2070 at 85.70 Mt and 84.1 Mt, respectively, surpassing Australia’s 2019 total waste production (74.07 Mt) and the waste from its oil, gas, copper, silver-lead-zinc, and coal sectors (Pickin et al. 2020 ). By 2100, Russia diamond industry’s mineral waste decreases to 51.88 Mt (the SSP1-1.9) and 68.26 Mt (the SSP2-2.6), which is higher than the Russian municipal waste in 2010 (49.4 Mt) (Tugov, 2013 ). DEIE prediction results show that Botswana’s annual mineral waste of the diamond industry in 2080 under the SSP1-1.9 scenario is 112.61 Mt. According to OECD data ( https://data.oecd.org/waste/municipal-waste.htm ), it is more than twice that of Germany’s municipal waste in 2020. Under the SSP2-2.6, the annual waste will reach 114.42 Mt in 2100, four times higher than that of French municipal waste (Alzamora and Barros, 2020 ). Botswana’s diamond mining waste would need 1.91 billion cubic meters of landfill space, potentially yielding 68.20 million kilograms of rice, feeding approximately 116.58 million people and supporting 31,000 households annually. Congo’s mineral waste is projected to require 2.49 million cubic meters of landfill space, reaching 111.95 Mt under the SSP1-1.9 and 146.55 Mt under the SSP2-2.6 by 2080. South Africa’s diamond waste is expected to increase to 52.96 Mt by 2080 under the SSP1-1.9, then drop to 50.35 Mt by 2100, while under the SSP2-2.6, it will rise steadily from 41.51 Mt in 2030 to 69.33 Mt in 2100.

The DEIE prediction results show that the water usage of the Australian diamond industry peaks in 2070 under two scenarios, 15.64 million m 3 (the SSP1-1.9) and 15.34 million m 3 (the SSP2-2.6), respectively, which is ten times of the total water usage of the Australian mining sector in 2017 (Northey et al. 2019 ). DEIE shows the maximum water consumption of the diamond industry in Russia could reach 14.48 million m 3 (the SSP2-2.6, 2030). Under the SSP2-2.6 scenario, the water consumption of the diamond industry in Botswana and DR Congo can reach 26.90 million m 3 (2100) and 26.75 million m 3 (2100), respectively. In contract, South Africa’s diamond industry is projected to consume 12.64 million m³ (2100) of water under the SSP2-2.6 scenario.

Environmental benefits evaluation of lab-grown diamond

The Paris Agreement aims to keep global warming to no more than 1.5 °C, and emissions are supposed to be reduced by 45% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050 (Rogelj et al. 2016 ). To achieve this ambition, a multitude of environmental issues caused by the global diamond industry need to be alleviated by appropriate policies. As an alternative, lab-grown diamonds have been introduced to the diamond market in recent years. In 2016, the market share of lab-grown diamonds was only 1.7%. It reached to 3.8% and in 2021 with an annual growth rate of 0.42% (Pereira et al. 2019 ). This paper predicts that without external factors, lab-grown diamonds will hold a 36.98% market share by 2100, serving as the baseline. This projection is based on historical growth rates. It also considers an optimistic scenario where the market share could reach 72.26% due to increased government support, media attention, changing preferences, and environmental awareness, potentially doubling the baseline figure. Two market share scenarios, baseline and optimistic, are analyzed under the SSP1-1.9 and the SSP2-2.6, resulting in four distinct outcomes. Table 1 . shows the environmental impact under the four scenarios and demonstrates the emission reduction benefits of lab-grown diamonds (Frost and Sullivan, 2014 ).

The GHG emissions across four scenarios will exceed 9 Mt in 2030. The SSP2-2.6 lab-grown diamonds scenario predicts 10.28 Mt emissions in 2030, with the lowest being 9.27 Mt under the UpsideSSP1-1.9. By 2050, emissions under baseline scenarios are projected at 10.76 Mt (the SSP2-2.6) and 9.75 Mt (the SSP1-1.9), while the upside scenarios forecast 8.93 Mt and 8.09 Mt, respectively. In 2100, the BaselineSSP2-2.6 emissions are expected at 7.38 Mt, with the BaselineSSP1-1.9 being 2.02 Mt lower. The BaselineSSP2-2.6’s total emissions could reach 8.36 Mt, while the UpsideSSP1-1.9 might only see 2.67 Mt, a 5.69 Mt difference. The DEIE estimates that global diamond mining in 2030 will produce up to 44.94 Mt of mineral waste under the BaselineSSP1-1.9, with a minimum of 40.51 Mt under the UpsideSSP2-2.6, potentially containing hazardous substances like heavy metals. These wastes are often stored unsafely, posing health, economic, and environmental risks. By 2050, waste will range from 47.13 Mt (the BaselineSSP1-1.9) to 35.41 Mt (the UpsideSSP2-2.6). By 2100, as lab-grown diamonds gain market share, global mineral waste will decrease to a minimum of 11.74 Mt. The water consumption of the diamond industry in 2030 is 7.68 million m 3 to 8.44 million m 3 . In 2050, the water consumption under the BaselineSSP2-2.6 is close to 9 million m 3 . Two scenarios in 2100 under the upside assumption generate 2.99 million m 3 (the SSP1-1.9) and 4.12 million m 3 (the SSP2-2.6), respectively.

This paper also calculates the sustainable benefits of lab-grown diamonds. Figure 4 shows that the environmental impact reduction effect of lab-grown diamonds is increasing during the whole sample period. The emission mitigation amount of the four scenarios in 2030 is below 1.5 Mt; The UpsideSSP2-2.6 has the highest emission reduction effect (1.50 Mt) in 2030. The emission reduction benefit of the upside scenario in 2060 is higher than 3.51 Mt. In 2100, lab-grown diamonds can reduce emissions by 9.58 Mt in the UpsideSSP2-2.6. Apart from that, lab-grown diamonds are effective in reducing mineral waste. In 2030, its reduction effect in the baseline scenario is higher than 35 Mt, and that in the upside scenario is higher than 60 Mt. In 2050, the lab-grown diamond industry can reduce mineral waste by more than 100 Mt, with a maximum scenario of 169 Mt. The mineral waste reduction effect is particularly obvious in 2100. Under the scenario of the baseline market share of lab-grown diamonds, the mineral waste reduction is 247.81 Mt (the SSP1-1.9) and 341.33 Mt (the SSP2-2.6), respectively, while the upside substitution expresses that the mineral waste reduction can reach 305.45 Mt (the SSP1-1.9) and 421.06 Mt (the SSP2-2.6). At the international level, according to OECD data ( https://data.oecd.org/waste/municipal-waste.htm ), the reduced mineral waste in 2100 under the Upside SSP2-2.6 exceeds twice the total municipal waste of China (203 Mt) (Qu et al. 2019 ). It can save 714 million cubic meters of landfill space for mineral waste. This space could be used to grow 255 million kilograms of rice, feed 436 million people, and free 1.19 million households from hunger within one year. In terms of water use, the water-saving efficiency of lab-grown diamonds will be about 5 million m 3 to 10 million m 3 in 2030. The UpsideSSP2-2.9 could save 26 Mt of water in 2050. In 2100, under the BaselineSSP2-2.6, the UpsideSSP1-1.9, and the UpsideSSP2-2.6, the water resources that can be saved by lab-grown diamonds are higher than 10 million m 3 .

This figure summarizes the baseline and optimistic sustainable effectiveness of lab-grown diamonds in 2030, 2060, and 2100 based on the SSP1-1.9 and the SSP2-2.6. a refers to the environmental impact of GHG emissions; b represents the mineral waste disposed or stored; c illustrates the water usage including potable and non-potable water usage. The horizontal coordinate is the year while the vertical coordinate is the related environmental indicators of the global diamond mining industry in the corresponding year. Circles of different sizes indicate emission reductions. Blue (GHG emissions), purple (mineral waste), and grey (water usage) represent the scenarios of the SSP1-1.9, whereas pink (GHG emissions), yellow (mineral waste), and green (water usage) represent the SSP2-2.6. Light and dark colors show the baseline assumption and optimal assumption of lab-grown diamond market shares, respectively.

The examination of GHG emissions across different scenarios reveals a consistent trend where emissions remain significantly high through 2030, 2050, and 2100, underscoring the enduring environmental impacts of the diamond industry. In 2030, even under the most optimistic scenarios, GHG emissions are projected to exceed 9 Mt, with the baseline scenario (adapted for lab-grown diamonds under the SSP2-2.6) expected to generate 10.28 Mt of GHG emissions. This trend persists into 2050 and 2100, indicating that emissions will continue to pose a considerable challenge without substantial interventions. By 2050, under the baseline scenario, emissions are expected to increase slightly to 10.76 Mt (the SSP2-2.6) and 9.75 Mt (the SSP1-1.9), with the upside scenarios projecting slightly lower emissions of 8.93 Mt and 8.09 Mt, respectively. The projections extend into 2100, where the BaselineSSP2-2.6 emissions are forecasted at 7.38 Mt, with the BaselineSSP1-1.9 emissions being approximately 2.02 Mt lower. The contrast between the baseline and upside scenarios becomes more pronounced over time, with a notable difference of 5.96 Mt in emissions under the BaselineSSP2-2.6 and the UpsideSSP1-1.9 scenarios. This analysis underscores the critical need for the diamond industry to adopt more sustainable practices. The persistently high GHG emissions levels across all scenarios highlight the industry’s significant carbon footprint.

The assessment of the DEIE model emphasizes the considerable environmental burden posed by the global diamond industry, particularly in terms of mineral waste generation. In 2030, DEIE predictions indicate that the industry could generate 44.94 Mt of mineral waste under the BaselineSSP1-1.9 scenario, with even the minimum scenario, the UpsideSSP2-2.6, expected to produce 40.51 Mt. This waste, often comprising hazardous substances like heavy metals, poses severe risks. Traditionally managed through storage in large ponds or heaps, these waste repositories can lead to catastrophic leaks or breaches, impacting human health, economic stability, and environmental integrity for extended periods. By 2050, the volume of mineral waste is projected to range between 47.13 Mt in the BaselineSSP1-1.9 scenario and 35.41 Mt in the UpsideSSP2-2.6 scenario. A major decline in mineral waste to 11.74 Mt is anticipated by 2100, attributed to the increasing market share of lab-grown diamonds, which suggests an urgent need for innovation and transition towards more sustainable production methods.

Moreover, the diamond industry’s water consumption is also a critical environmental consideration. In 2030, water usage is estimated to be between 7.68 and 8.44 million m³, escalating to nearly 9 million m³ under the BaselineSSP2-2.6 scenario by 2050. By 2100, under optimistic assumptions, water consumption is expected to decrease markedly to 2.99 million m³ (the SSP1-1.9) and 4.12 million m³ (the SSP2-2.6), emphasizing the increasing efficiency and sustainability of diamond production processes over time.

This analysis evaluates the sustainable advantages of lab-grown diamonds, mainly when powered by clean energy sources. The data reveals a consistent increase in the environmental benefits attributed to lab-grown diamonds throughout the observed period. In 2030, the emission reduction potential across all scenarios does not exceed 1.50 Mt, with the UpsideSSP2-2.6 scenario demonstrating the most significant impact by reducing emissions by 1.50 Mt. This trend of emission mitigation continues to grow, with the upside scenario in 2060 exceeding an emission reduction of 3.51 Mt. By the turn of the century, lab-grown diamonds are projected to diminish emissions by as much as 9.58 Mt under the UpsideSSP2-2.6 scenario.

The benefits of lab-grown diamonds extend beyond emission reductions to substantially curtail mineral waste. In 2030, the reduction in mineral waste is anticipated to exceed 35 Mt in the baseline scenario and 60 Mt in the upside scenario. By 2050, the lab-grown diamond industry could potentially reduce mineral waste by over 100 Mt, peaking at a reduction of 169 Mt in the most optimistic scenario. The long-term potential is even more striking, with projections for 2100 showing a reduction in mineral waste of 247.81 Mt (the SSP1-1.9) and 341.33 Mt (the SSP2-2.6) in the baseline scenarios, and an even more substantial decrease to 305.45 Mt (the SSP1-1.9) and 421.06 Mt (the SSP2-2.6) in the most favorable circumstances. This comprehensive analysis emphasizes the substantial environmental benefits that lab-grown diamonds can offer, especially those produced using clean energy. By markedly reducing greenhouse gas emissions and mineral waste, lab-grown diamonds present a sustainable alternative that could mitigate the environmental impacts associated with traditional diamond mining.

In the context of water conservation, lab-grown diamonds offer a promising avenue for significant savings. By 2030, it is estimated that the water use efficiency of lab-grown diamonds could result in savings ranging from 5 million m³ to 10 million m³. This figure escalates by 2050 in the UpsideSSP2-2.9 scenario, with a projected saving of 26 Mt of water. Looking ahead to 2100, the scenarios of BaselineSSP2-2.6, UpsideSSP1-1.9, and UpsideSSP2-2.6 all suggest that the water savings attributable to lab-grown diamonds will exceed 10 million m³. These projections highlight the environmental stewardship potential of lab-grown diamonds, not only in terms of reducing mineral waste and conserving land but also in significantly contributing to water conservation. The shift towards lab-grown diamonds represents a forward-thinking approach to sustainable development, with wide-ranging implications for environmental preservation and resource management on a global scale.

The global implications of adopting lab-grown diamonds are important, as evidenced by OECD data ( https://data.oecd.org/waste/municipal-waste.htm ) comparing the reduction in mineral waste to existing waste management benchmarks. By 2100, the anticipated reduction in mineral waste from the Upside SSP2-2.6 scenario is projected to surpass twice the total municipal waste of China in 2018 (203 Mt) (Qu et al. 2019 ). This equates to conserving 714 million cubic meters of potential landfill space, which can be translated into tangible benefits for food production and hunger alleviation. Specifically, the freed-up land could support the cultivation of 255 million kilograms of rice, sufficient to feed approximately 436 million individuals, thereby potentially liberating 1.19 million households from the grips of hunger annually.

Lab-grown diamonds offer a sustainable alternative to mined diamonds, aligning with the rising consumer demand for environmentally responsible products (Delgado et al. 2015 ). Lab-grown diamond is a perfect match for consumers who prioritize green values while still desiring sparkling diamonds (Joy et al. 2012 ). Despite the appeal of lab-grown diamonds for those valuing sustainability alongside the desire for luxury, their market penetration remains limited. As of 2016, lab-grown diamonds represented a modest 1.7% of the diamond market, with traditional mined diamonds continuing to dominate. This preference for mined diamonds has been linked to a consumer inclination towards traditional production methods, a trend rooted in the symbolic significance of mined diamonds as expressions of love and socio-economic status, often amplified by social media. However, the DEIE framework indicates that increasing the market share of lab-grown diamonds could yield substantial economic and environmental benefits. Overcoming consumer skepticism requires strategic efforts to shift perceptions. Government policies and media campaigns illuminating the environmental and ethical advantages of lab-grown diamonds could play a crucial role in this transition, addressing the underlying causes of production-process conservatism (Ha et al. 2015 ) and encouraging a broader acceptance of lab-grown diamonds as viable and desirable alternatives.

The shift towards lab-grown diamonds represents an environmental imperative as well as a socio-economic opportunity, especially for regions heavily reliant on diamond mining. While concerns exist that moving away from traditional diamond mining could impact job availability, the reality of the situation in mining regions paints a different picture. In countries like Botswana, where the diamond mining industry is fraught with challenges, the economy is significantly dependent on diamond exports. These include not only the physical risks associated with mining, such as injuries occurring at a notable rate of 0.115 per 100 employees annually, but also the broader social implications, including the abuse of child labor and the limitation of job opportunities in other sectors due to the dominance of mining. This reliance on an industry characterized by unsustainable practices and social risks indicates the necessity for innovation. In light of previous studies, although lab-grown diamonds attract controversy among stakeholders (Coste-Manière and Gardetti, 2021 ), their production process relies on renewable energy and has the capability to reduce GHG emissions to 0.028 grams per carat, resulting in zero working and environmental incidents (Frost and Sullivan, 2014 ), as it is an entirely indoor process with infrastructure where the chances of any environmental hazard taking place are non-existent. Transitioning to lab-grown diamonds could mitigate these issues by offering alternative employment opportunities in a new and sustainable sector. This shift has the potential to catalyze industrial innovation, thereby creating jobs that are safer and more sustainable in the long term. Such a transition could alleviate poverty and reduce reliance on an industry that, in its current form, perpetuates a cycle of illness and impoverishment due to its environmental and social impacts.

Under the initiative of the Paris Agreement, various countries are adopting different policies to achieve decarbonization (Ulpiani et al. 2023 ; Shang et al. 2023 ). In general, policymakers advocate for industrial transformation and upgrading to a more sustainable sector (He et al. 2012 ; Xia et al. 2019 ). However, this usually requires a significant amount of capital investment. Compared to the conventional mining process, laboratory cultivation requires less capital investment. The initial cost of a lab-grown diamond is one-third that of a mined diamond, while the cost of the final product is 42% that of its counterpart (Rrustemi and Tuchschmid, 2020 ). This phenomenon provides opportunities for suppliers and retailers to gain more profit, along with a greater consumer surplus. The sustainable transformation of the diamond industry requires both effective pollution reduction and the maintenance of its scale in a cost-saving way. Furthermore, this transformation can be viewed as a technological advancement that promotes a greener and more sustainable innovation, with the goal of ensuring that new products, processes, and services improve human well-being without compromising the integrity of the environment’s life support systems (Smith et al. 2010 ). In conclusion, lab-grown diamonds produced using clean energy can replace natural diamonds, achieving a win-win situation for both the environment and the economy.

Data availability

All data (both row and curated) from the current study are available in the Harvard Dataverse, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/DCEANZ .

Emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, or cement production within a country’s borders. It does not consider the emissions of traded goods, i.e. consumption-based emissions., which is larger than the total emissions of the local agriculture, transportation, manufacturing & construction, and building sectors in 2019. In addition, the mineral waste generated by the Australian diamond industry under the SSP1-1.9 and the SSP2-2.6 in 2070 is 85.70 Mt and 84.1 Mt, respectively, exceeding Australia’s total core waste and ash generation by material and stream in 2019 (74.07 Mt) (Azadi et al. 2019 ). The mineral waste of the Russian diamond industry decreased to the lowest level in 2100, which, however, is still higher than the Russian municipal waste.

Municipal waste is defined as waste collected and treated by or for municipalities. It covers waste from households, including bulky waste, similar waste from commerce and trade, office buildings, institutions, and small businesses, as well as yard and garden waste, street sweepings, the contents of litter containers, and market cleansing waste if managed as household waste. The definition excludes waste from municipal sewage networks and treatment, as well as waste from construction and demolition activities.

According to South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control ( https://scdhec.gov/environment/land-and-waste-landfills/how-landfills-work ), about 1200 to 1400 pounds of garbage waste can be compacted into one cubic yard of space.

2.8 m 2 can grow one kilogram of rice (Poore and Nemecek, 2018 ).

People need 2000 calories of food per day, which is about 585 grams of rice (Snetselaar et al., 2021 ).

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Sun, Y., Jiang, S. & Wang, S. The environmental impacts and sustainable pathways of the global diamond industry. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11 , 671 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03195-y

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Home — Essay Samples — Environment — Environmental Issues — Diamond Mining and the Environment: An Analysis of the Harmful Effects

Diamond Mining and The Environment: an Analysis of The Harmful Effects

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Introduction, environmental impacts of diamond mining, the debate surrounding diamond mining, soil disruption and deforestation, destruction of habitats and biodiversity, water and soil pollution, the economic benefits of diamond mining, the ethical considerations of diamond mining, the potential for sustainable diamond mining practices.

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Evolutionary and Revolutionary Technologies for Mining (2002)

Chapter: 2 overview of technology and mining, 2 overview of technology and mining.

This chapter provides background information on the exploration, mining, and processing of mineral commodities. This is followed by a brief overview of the current state of technology in these fields. The role of research and development in improving technology, and thus in offsetting the adverse effects of mineral-resource depletion over time, are highlighted.

IMPORTANCE OF MINING

Mining is first and foremost a source of mineral commodities that all countries find essential for maintaining and improving their standards of living. Mined materials are needed to construct roads and hospitals, to build automobiles and houses, to make computers and satellites, to generate electricity, and to provide the many other goods and services that consumers enjoy.

In addition, mining is economically important to producing regions and countries. It provides employment, dividends, and taxes that pay for hospitals, schools, and public facilities. The mining industry produces a trained workforce and small businesses that can service communities and may initiate related businesses. Mining also yields foreign exchange and accounts for a significant portion of gross domestic product. Mining fosters a number of associated activities, such as manufacturing of mining equipment, provision of engineering and environmental services, and the development of world-class universities in the fields of geology, mining engineering, and metallurgy. The economic opportunities and wealth generated by mining for many producing countries are substantial.

MINING AND THE U.S. ECONOMY

Mining is particularly important to the U.S. economy because the United States is one of the world’s largest consumers of mineral products and one of the world’s largest producers. In fact, the United States is the world’s largest single consumer of many mineral commodities .

The United States satisfies some of its huge demand for mineral commodities by imports (Figure 2-1). For decades, the country has imported alumina and aluminum, iron ore and steel, manganese, tin, copper, and other mineral commodities. Nevertheless, the country is also a major producing country and a net exporter of a several mineral commodities, most notably gold. As Table 2-1 shows, the United States produces huge quantities of coal, iron ore, copper, phosphate rock, and zinc, as well as many other mineral commodities that are either exported directly or used in products that can be exported.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the value of the nonfuel 1 mineral commodities produced in the United States by mining totaled some $39 billion in 1999 (USGS, 2000). The value of processed materials of mineral origin produced in the United States in 1999 was estimated to be $422 billion (USGS, 2000). U.S. production of coal in 1999 was 1,094 million short tons, which represents an estimated value of $27 billion (EIA, 1999a). However, the true contribution of mining to the U.S. economy is not fully reflected in these figures. For example, the economic impact of energy from coal, which produces 22 percent of the nation’s energy and about 56 percent of its electricity, is not included.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics in the U.S. Department of Commence estimates that the number of people directly employed in metal mining is about 45,000, in coal about 80,000, and in industrial minerals about 114,000 (U.S. Department of Labor, 2000a). Together these figures account for less than 1 percent of the country’s total employment in the goods-producing sector (U.S. Department of Labor, 2000a). The low employment number reflects the great advances in technology and productivity in all mining sectors and lower production costs.

Does not include coal, uranium, petroleum, or natural gas.

TABLE 2-1 U.S. net imports of selected nonfuel mineral materials.

SOURCE: USGS, 2000.


Arsenic trioxide	100	China, Chile, Mexico
Bauxite and alumina	100	Australia, Guinea, Jamaica, Brazil
Bismuth	100	Belgium, Mexico, United Kingdom, China
Columbium (niobium)	100	Brazil, Canada, Germany, Russia
Fluorspar	100	China, South Africa, Mexico
Graphite (natural)	100	Mexico, Canada, China, Madagascar
Manganese	100	South Africa, Gabon, Australia, France
Mica, sheet (natural)	100	India, Belgium, Germany, China
Strontium	100	Mexico, Germany
Thallium	100	Belgium, Mexico, Germany, United Kingdom
Thorium	100	France
Yttrium	100	China, France, United Kingdom, Japan
Gemstones	99	Israel, Belgium, India
Antimony	85	China, Bolivia, Mexico, South Africa
Tin	85	Brazil, Indonesia, Bolivia, China
Tungsten	81	China, Russia, Bolivia, Germany
Chromium	80	South Africa, Russia, Turkey, Zimbabwe
Potash	80	Canada, Russia, Belarus
Tantalum	80	Australia, Thailand, China, Germany
Stone (dimension)	77	Italy, India, Canada, Spain
Titanium concentrates	77	South Africa, Australia, Canada, India
Cobalt	73	Norway, Finland, Canada, Zambia
Rare earths	72	China, France, Japan, United Kingdom
Iodine	68	Chile, Japan, Russia
Barite	67	China, India, Mexico, Morocco
Nickel	63	Canada, Russia, Norway, Australia
Peat	57	Canada
Titanium (sponge)	44	Russia, Japan, Kazakhstan, China
Diamond (dust, grit and powder)	41	Ireland, China, Russia
Magnesium compounds	40	China, Canada, Austria, Greece
Pumice	35	Greece, Turkey, Ecuador, Italy
Aluminum	30	Canada, Russia, Venezuela, Mexico
Silicon	30	Norway, Russia, Brazil, Canada
Zinc	30	Canada, Russia, Peru
Gypsum	29	Canada, Mexico, Spain
Magnesium metal	29	Canada, Russia, China, Israel
Copper	27	Canada, Chile, Mexico
Nitrogen (fixed), ammonia	26	Trinidad and Tobago, Canada, Mexico, Venezuela
Cement	23	Canada, Spain, Venezuela, Greece
Mica, scrap and flake (natural)	23	Canada, India, Finland, Japan
Iron and steel	22	European Union, Canada, Japan, Russia
Lead	20	Canada, Mexico, Peru, Australia
Cadmium	19	Canada, Belgium, Germany, Australia
Iron ore	17	Canada, Brazil, Venezuela, Australia
Sulfur	17	Canada, Mexico, Venezuela
Salt	16	Canada, Chile, Mexico, Bahamas
Silver	14	Mexico, Canada, Peru, Chile
Perlite	13	Greece
Asbestos	7	Canada
Phosphate rock	7	Morocco
Talc	6	China, Canada, Japan
Iron and steel scrap	3	Canada, United Kingdom, Venezuela, Mexico
Beryllium	2	Kazakhstan, Russia, Canada, Germany

TABLE 2-2 U.S. Consumption and Production of Selected Mineral Commodities

	Consumption (percentage of world total)	Production (percentage of world total)
Coal	21	22
Uranium	28	6
Iron ore and steel	14	11
Aluminum and bauxite	33	0
Copper	23	13
Zinc	18	11
Gold	10	15
Phosphate rock	32	30
Consumption is for the processed product (e.g., aluminum and steel), production is for the mined product (e.g., bauxite and ores of uranium, iron, aluminum, copper, and zinc). DOE, Energy Information Agency ( ). Data are totals for anthracite, bituminous coal, and lignite for 1998. Data are for 1999. (Uranium Institute, 1999). Calculated based on U.S. consumption data and world production data (USGS, 2000). Production data from U.S. Geological Survey Mineral Commodity Summaries 2000 (USGS, 2000). Production data are for 1999.

In states and regions where mining is concentrated the industry plays a much more important role in the local economy. Overall, the economy cannot function without minerals and the products made from them. Mining in the United States produces metals, industrial minerals, coal, and uranium. All 50 states mine either sand and gravel or crushed stone for construction aggregate, and the mining of other commodities is widespread. The contribution of mining extends to jobs and related benefits to downstream products such as automobiles, railroads, buildings, and other community facilities.

Metal mining, which was once widespread, is now largely concentrated in the West (Figures 2-2a and 2-2b ), although it is still important in Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, and Tennessee. The minerals mined include iron, copper, gold, silver, molybdenum, zinc, and a number of valuable but less common metals. Most are sold as commodities at prices set by exchanges rather than by producers. Moreover, the high value-to-weight ratio of most metals means they can be sold in global markets, forcing domestic producers to compete with foreign operations.

The trend in metal mining has been toward fewer, larger, more efficient facilities. Through mergers and acquisitions, the number of companies has decreased, and foreign ownership has increased. The search for economies of scale has also intensified. Mines now employ fewer people per unit of output, and operators are eager to adopt new technologies to increase their efficiency, which benefits customers and reduces the cost of products. Because metal mines have no control over commodity prices, their prevailing philosophy to survive is that they must cut costs. As a result, most domestic metal mining companies have largely done away with in-house research and development, and many are reluctant to invest in technology development for which there is no immediate need.

Industrial Minerals

Industrial minerals, which are critical raw materials for the construction industry, agriculture, and the chemical and manufacturing sectors of the economy, are produced by more than 6,400 companies from some 11,000 mines, quarries, and plants widely scattered throughout the country (Figure 2-3a and 2-3b ). Most industrial minerals have a degree of price flexibility because international competition in the domestic market is limited. Although some companies and plants are large, size is not always necessary for economic success. However, obtaining permits for new mines and quarries is often difficult, especially near urban areas, and this may favor larger operations and more underground mining in the future.

The major industrial materials are crushed stone, sand, and gravel, which are lumped together as “aggregate” and comprise about 75 percent of the total value of all industrial minerals. A wide variety of other materials are also mined, such as limestone, building stone, specialty sand, clay, and gypsum for construction; phosphate rock, potash, and sulfur for agriculture 2 ; and salt, lime, soda ash, borates, magnesium compounds, sodium sulfate, rare earths, bromine, and iodine for the chemical industries. Industrial materials also include a myriad of substances used in pigments, coatings, fillers and extenders, filtering aids, ceramics, glass, refractory raw materials, and other products.

Certain industrial minerals, such as aggregates and limestone, are sometimes said to have “place value.” That is, they are low-value, bulk commodities used in such large quantities that nearby sources are almost mandatory. Competition from imports is generally unlikely, although exceptions can be found. Low production costs combined with low ocean transportation costs, allows cement clinker to be imported from Canada, Taiwan, Scandinavia, and China. At one end of the spectrum, some materials, such as domestic high-grade kaolin, require extensive processing and are so valuable that the United States is a major exporter. At the other end, materials such as natural graphite and sheet mica are so rare and domestic sources so poor that the United States imports 100 percent of its needs.

Nitrogen, once mined as sodium nitrate, has been extracted from the atmosphere by the Haber ammonia process for nearly a century.

FIGURE 2-1a Major base and ferrous metal producing areas. Source: Adapted from USGS, 2000.

FIGURE 2-1b Major precious metal producing areas. Source: Adapted from USGS, 2000.

FIGURE 2-2a Major industrial rock and mineral producing areas – Part I. SOURCE: Adapted from USGS, 2000.

FIGURE 2-2b Major industrial rock and mineral producing areas – Part II. SOURCE: Adapted from USGS, 2000.

Unlike the aggregate industry, which is spread over most of the country, some industrial minerals are concentrated in certain parts of the country (Figures 2-3a and 2-3b ). Phosphate mining is confined to Florida, North Carolina, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming. Newly mined sulfur comes from the offshore Gulf of Mexico and western Texas, but recovered sulfur comes from many sources, such as power plants, smelters, and petroleum refineries. The Carolinas and Georgia are the only sources of high-grade kaolin and certain refractory raw materials. The United States has had only one significant rare-earth mine, located in the desert in southeastern California. Potash, once mined in New Mexico and Utah, now comes mostly from western Canada, where production costs are lower.

The technologies used in the industrial-minerals sector vary widely, from relatively simple mining, crushing, and sizing technologies for common aggregates to highly sophisticated technologies for higher value minerals, such as kaolin and certain refractory raw materials. Agricultural minerals, including phosphates, potash, and sulfur, are in a technological middle range. Uranium can be recovered from phosphate processing. Some investments in new technologies for industrial minerals are intended to increase productivity, but most are intended to produce higher quality products to meet market demands.

Coal and Uranium

Coal is the most important fuel mineral mined in the United States. With annual production in excess of a billion tons since 1994, the United States is the second largest producer of coal in the world. Nearly 90 percent of this production is used for electricity generation; coal accounts for about 56 percent of the electricity generated in the United States (EIA, 1999b). In recent years coal has provided about 22 percent of all of the energy consumed in the United States. Although the nation’s reserves of coal are very large, increases in production have been rather small.

Several projections show that coal will lose market share to natural gas, a trend that could be accelerated by concerns over global warming (Abelson, 2000). Coal production may benefit in the short run, however, from electricity deregulation as coal-fired plants use more of their increased generating capacity. With the price of natural gas increasing by more than 100 percent in recent months, projections of future energy mix must be viewed with caution, at least in the short term.

Coal is found in many areas of the United States (Figure 2-4), although there are regional differences in the quantity and quality. Anthracite is found primarily in northeastern Pennsylvania; bituminous coking coals are found throughout the Appalachian region; and other bituminous grades and subbituminous coals are widely distributed throughout Appalachia, the Midwest, and western states.

Deposits of lignite of economic value are found in Montana and the Dakotas, as well as in Texas and Mississippi. Because lignite is about 40 percent water, it is ordinarily used in power plants near the deposits. In recent years considerable research has been focused on making synthetic liquid fuels from lignite.

Some Appalachian and most midcontinent coals have high sulfur contents and thus generate sulfur dioxide when burned in a power plant. Under current environmental regulations effluent gases may have to be scrubbed and the sulfur sequestered. Many power producers have found it more economical to purchase coals from western states. These coals have less sulfur and are preferrable even though they have lower calorific power (energy content). Therefore, the market share of large western mines is increasing. Most western coals are mined from large surface mines, and delivery costs are low because of the availability of rail transportation. Because the capital costs of sulfur scrubbing are high, low-sulfur coal from Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado can be shipped economically by rail over long distances. Concerns about mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants may also influence the future use of coal.

The extensive coal reserves in Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico are large enough to produce power to meet local needs, as well as for “wheeling” (transporting energy) over high-voltage transmission lines to Pacific coast states. To serve this market, “mine-mouth” power plants have been built, although air quality and the transmission lines themselves have raised environmental concerns.

Uranium is also mined in the United States. The Energy Information Agency reports that “yellowcake” (an oxide with 91.8 percent uranium) production was 2,300 short tons in 1999 (EIA, 1999d). Overall, nuclear generation produces about 20 percent of the country’s electric power (EIA, 1999b). Because the United States is not currently building new nuclear power facilities and because power generation is expanding, uranium’s share of electric power generation is likely to fall in the near term. In the longer run, however, the use of uranium in power generation may increase, particularly if the United States seriously attempts to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions. In a recent article in Science, Sailor et al. (2000) presented a scenario in which the global carbon dioxide emissions would remain near their present values in 2050, but only by increasing nuclear power generation more than 12-fold.

OVERVIEW OF CURRENT TECHNOLOGIES

The three mining sectors (metals, coal, and industrial minerals) have some common needs for new technologies; other technologies would have narrower applications; and some would be for unique or highly specialized uses. Metal mining can include the following components: exploration and development, drilling, blasting or mechanical excavating, loading, hauling, crushing, grinding, classifying, separating, dewatering, and storage or disposal. Separation may be by physical or

FIGURE 2-3 Coal-bearing areas of the United States. SOURCE: EIA, 1999c.

chemical means, or by a combination of processes; dewatering may be by thickening, filtering, centrifugation, or drying. Storage of metal concentrates may be open or enclosed; disposal of waste products is ordinarily in ponds or dumps. Treatment beyond crushing may be by wet or dry methods; if the latter, dust control is necessary. Classification is usually thought of as discrimination based on size, although with the use of a medium (usually water or air) particles can be differentiated to some degree by mass, or even by shape.

Mining of industrial minerals may include several of the unit operations listed above, but the largest sector of this type of mining (the production of stone, gravel, and sand) seldom requires separation beyond screening, classification, and dense media separation, such as jigging. Other industrial mineral operations require very sophisticated technologies, even by metal-mining standards, to obtain the high quality of certain mineral commodities.

The most common mining methods used by surface coal mines are open pits with shovel-and-truck teams and opencast mines with large draglines. In underground coal mining, the most common methods are mechanical excavation with continuous miners and longwall shearers. Some coals, mostly coals mined underground, may require processing in a preparation plant to produce marketable products. Crushing and screening are common, as are large-scale gravity plants using jigs and dense-media separators, but flotation is not always attractive because of its costs and the moisture content of the shipped product. Coal and coal-bed methane are combustible and sometimes explosive. Therefore, deliberate fine grinding is avoided until just before the coal is burned.

Although the mining industry dates back thousands of years, the industry’s technology is quite modern, the result of both incremental improvements and revolutionary developments. Although a miner or explorer, say, 75 years ago might recognize some of the equipment and techniques used today, many important changes have occurred in equipment design and applications. Trucks, shovels, and drills are much larger; electricity and hydraulic drives have replaced compressed air; construction materials are stronger and more durable; equipment may now contain diagnostic computers to anticipate failures; and such equipment usually yields

higher productivity, increased margins of safety for workers and the public, and greater environmental protection.

Although incremental improvements have driven much of this progress, major contributions have also come from revolutionary developments. Some examples of revolutionary developments in mining are the use of ammonium-nitrate explosives and aluminized-slurry explosives, millisecond delays in blast ignition, the global positioning system (GPS) in surface-mine operations, rock bolts, multidrill hydraulic jumbos, load-haul-dump units, safety couplers on mine cars, longwall mining, and airborne respirable dust control. In plants there are radiometric density gauges, closed-circuit television, hydrocyclones, wedge-bar screens, autogenous and semiautogenous grinding mills, wrap-around drives, high-intensity magnetic separators, spirals and Reichert cones, high-tension separators, continuous assay systems, high-pressure roll grinding, computerized modeling and process control, and many more innovations. The increase in productivity in the past several decades made possible by new technologies has far exceeded the average increase for the U.S. economy as a whole.

INDUSTRIES OF THE FUTURE PROGRAM

The goals of the IOF program, namely improving energy efficiency, reducing waste generation, and increasing productivity, present both challenges and opportunities for mining. Exploration normally requires very little energy. However, some exploration techniques, such as satellite remote sensing, require space flights, which require prodigious amounts of energy. Reducing waste generation suggests that more waste be left underground, and this is already being done to a considerable extent in the underground metal-mining sector by returning tailings mixed with cement underground as fill. If in-situ mining is considered as a means of reducing waste, the site-specific nature of this method and its potential environmental effects must be taken into account. Increasing productivity will require increasing output or reducing input, or both.

The IOF progam has identified potential areas for improvements in mining. Some enabling tools are already available: sensors, ground-penetrating radar, GPS, and laser measuring techniques. Possible applications in surface and underground mining and milling operations include autonomous robotic equipment, technologies that can “look ahead” of the working face, safer and faster rock bolting closer to the face, and mechanical excavators or drill-blast-load units capable of working close to the face while keeping personnel away from dangerous situations.

Investments in research and development by the mineral industry have been smaller than those of other industries for several reasons. Typically, investment in research and development is risky. Furthermore, the mining industry often considers exploration itself as a form of research. Therefore, rather than investing research funds in the development of new technologies, the industry has invested heavily in exploration to find high-grade, large, or other more attractive deposits, which can lead to better positioning in the competitive business enviroment.

BENEFITS RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT

Mineral commodities are extracted from nonrenewable resources, which has raised concerns about their long-term availability. Many believe that, as society exploits its favorable existing mineral deposits and is forced to then exploit poorer quality deposits that are more remote and more difficult to process, the real costs and prices of essential mineral commodities will rise. This could threaten the living standards of future generations and make sustainable development more difficult or impossible. Mineral depletion tends to push up the real prices of mineral commodities over time. However, innovations and new technologies tend to mitigate this upward pressure by making it easier to find new deposits, enabling the exploitation of entirely new types of deposits, and reducing the costs of mining and processing mineral commodities. With innovations and new technologies more abundant resources can be substituted for less abundant resources. In the long run the availability of mineral commoditie will depend on the outcome of a race between the cost-increasing effects of depletion and the cost-reducing effects of new technologies and other innovations.

In the past century new technologies have won this race, and the real costs of most mineral commodities, despite their cyclic nature, have fallen substantially (Barnett and Morse, 1963). Real prices, another recognized measure of resource availability, have also fallen for many mineral commodities; although some scholars contend that this favorable trend has recently come to an end (see Krautkraemer [1998] for a survey of the literature in this area). In any case, there is no guarantee that new technologies will keep the threat of mineral depletion at bay indefinitely. However, research and development, along with the new technologies they produce, constitute the best weapon in society’s arsenal for doing so.

Mining research and development can not only lead to new technologies that reduce production costs. It can also enhance the quality of existing mineral commodities while reducing the environmental impacts of mining them and create entirely new mineral commodities. In the twentieth century, for example, the development of nuclear power created a demand for uranium, and the development of semiconductors created a demand for high-purity germanium and silicon.

Another by-product of investment in research and development is its beneficial effect on education. Research funds flowing to universities support students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels and provide opportunities for students to work closely with professors. In a synergistic way research and development funds help ensure that a supply of well-trained scientists and engineers will be available

in the future, including individuals who will be working in the fields of exploration, extraction, processing, health and safety, and environmental protection, as well as researchers, educators, and regulators.

The benefits from research and development generally accrue to both consumers and producers, with consumers enjoying most of the benefits over the long run. As both a major consumer and producer of mineral commodities, the United States is particularly likely to benefit greatly from successful research and development in mining tecnologies.

The Office of Industrial Technologies (OIT) of the U. S. Department of Energy commissioned the National Research Council (NRC) to undertake a study on required technologies for the Mining Industries of the Future Program to complement information provided to the program by the National Mining Association. Subsequently, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health also became a sponsor of this study, and the Statement of Task was expanded to include health and safety. The overall objectives of this study are: (a) to review available information on the U.S. mining industry; (b) to identify critical research and development needs related to the exploration, mining, and processing of coal, minerals, and metals; and (c) to examine the federal contribution to research and development in mining processes.

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Mining company tied to Cambodian military officials grabs community forest

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A mining company affiliated with powerful Cambodian officials and their families has carved out a chunk of a community forest in the country’s northeast to be privatized.
Community members say the company, Lin Vatey, is logging the forest, while community members who have complained or resisted have faced persecution by the authorities.
Phnom Chum Rok Sat community forest, officially recognized in 2017, spans 4,153 hectares (10,262 acres); Lin Vatey has laid claim to 2,447 hectares (6,047 acres) of it.
When questioned by Mongabay, officials at various levels of government initially denied there was anything going on in the community forest, before conceding that some complaints had been lodged.

STUNG TRENG, Cambodia — Rain poured down in torrential sheets as Ouk Mao guided reporters through the winding dirt tracks that were, in August, rutted with deep trenches of mud and rainwater as Cambodia’s wet season began in earnest.

Thunder cracked across the largely flat plains of Stung Treng province, in Cambodia’s northeast, and Mao joked about getting struck by lightning as he led Mongabay to the foot of Phnom Chhngok, a limestone mountain some 45 kilometers (28 miles) west of the provincial capital.

Since 2020, the mountain, swaddled in forest and home to a flock of bats, had served as the centerpiece to an ecotourism venture that was run largely by the Indigenous Kuy ethnic group to which Mao belongs. Some 400 people, many of them Kuy, helped preserve the forest and run the ecotourism destination as part of the Phnom Chum Rok Sat community forest, a 4,153-hectare (10,262-acre) patch of forest and mountains that were, until recently, managed by the community.

But all of this changed when a mining company tied to the Cambodian military began to expand operations across Phnom Chum Rok Sat earlier this year.

“The big trees are all gone now,” said Mao, pointing to a pile of recently felled timber that the community forest committee confiscated from loggers operating in Phnom Chum Rok Sat in May.

“Before, all that land belonged to the community forest,” Mao said. “Then Lin Vatey came, they were scouting for a mining site.”

Ouk Mao showed reporters timber cut from the Phnom Chum Rok Sat community forest by loggers working for Lin Vatey. Image by Nehru Pry / Mongabay

Lin Vatey, a local marble mining company established in 2019, began a six-month survey of Phnom Chum Rok Sat in 2020, according to local residents. Then, in 2022, it was awarded 700 hectares (1,730 acres) of the community forest.

“When our community went on patrol, they began seeing koy-yun ” — small tractors often used to transport timber — “all carrying timber out of the forest into the company’s land,” Mao said. “This began around the end of 2021.”

Community forests are created through agreements between communities and the Forestry Administration, which sits under the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. In 2017, the government signed off on the creation of Phnom Chum Rok Sat community forest, and Mao, among other residents of Chhvang village, formed the community forest’s committee, which patrolled and defended the forest, taking charge of how its resources were used.

But while contracts between a community and the Forestry Administration last 15 years, the government retains ownership of the land and of the resources above and below it — a weakness that Cambodia’s elite have been eager to exploit .

Until last year, Phnom Chum Rok Sat community forest lay adjacent to Chhaeb-Preah Roka Wildlife Sanctuary, a much-beleaguered protected area . Then, in July 2023, the sanctuary’s borders were expanded, consuming the community forest in the process and creating competing jurisdictions between the Forestry Administration and the Ministry of Environment. Despite a relatively contained mining site lifting chiseled blocks of limestone and marble out of the ground at the base of other mountains within the community forest, Mao and other residents of the community forest told Mongabay that deforestation has spiked since 2021 — a trend reflected in Global Forest Watch data .

But it was in May 2024 that a boundary began to be cut through the community forest, creating a barrier roughly 12 meters (39 feet) wide; at some points piling mud and rocks high enough to block access, at others digging a shallow trench to prevent vehicles crossing. By early July, the new border in Phnom Chum Rok Sat had encircled a section of the forest spanning more than 3,000 hectares (7,400 acres).

The border built between May and August 2024 encircles land inside Phnom Chum Rok Sat community forest claimed by two of Lin Vatey's board members along with their family and subordinates. Image by Gerald Flynn / Mongabay.

Military families move in

On June 2, concerned community members wrote to the government’s working group for Stung Treng province requesting intervention. Their request references a letter labeled No. 1456 that was addressed to the Ministry of Environment on June 26, 2023, requesting 3,064 hectares (7,571 acres) of land be privatized, of which 2,447 hectares (6,047 acres) is part of Phnom Chum Rok Sat community forest.

Community members said their copy of letter No. 1456 had since been seized by authorities, but they had used it as a reference to write their request for intervention. The Ministry of Environment has so far declined to share or publish the letter, although the new border created inside the forest matches the requested amount of land and a corresponding map seen by Mongabay. Letter No. 1456 is also referenced in a separate letter addressed to then-Stung Treng provincial governor Svay Sam Eang, dated July 6, 2023, in which a certain Ke Kol Sophea claims to represent people requesting permission to erect border posts around a 3,064-hectare plot of land in Chhvang village. Mongabay has obtained a copy of the letter but has not been able to verify the letter with Sophea or the Stung Treng provincial administration.

According to the request submitted to officials by the community, letter No. 1456 details a request for land from 10 individuals: Ke Kol Sophea, Vongsen Pisey, Vongsen Piseth, Long Molica, Kongkea Norphealey, Kongkea Razana, Sok Chandara, Him Sorsam, Kol Sopha and Ret Sokuntheary.

Two of the names listed in the letter appear in Ministry of Commerce records for Lin Vatey, the mining company already operating in the forest. Ke Kol Sophea is listed as Lin Vatey’s chair, while Vongsen Pisey is listed as a director at the company. Li Zhong Hua, the third and final director of Lin Vatey, was not named in letter No. 1456 but appears to be the only member of the board with any mining experience as he chairs Zhen Xing Hong Ye Stone Minerals. By contrast, neither Sophea nor Pisey are typical mining company executives.

Pisey is the daughter of Vong Pisen , commander-in-chief of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces (RCAF) — arguably one of the most powerful men in the country and a close ally of the ruling Hun family. Pisen’s brother, Vongsen Piseth, was also named in letter No. 1456.

This network map shows how all the people named in letter No. 1456 are connected through familial or business ties to powerful military figures. Image by Andrés Alegría / Mongabay.

Ke Kol Sophea, meanwhile, is an influential voice in Cambodia as director-general of Nokor Wat Media , a largely pro-government online media outlet. Sophea often uses that platform to support the long-ruling Cambodian People’s Party. Her husband, Brigadier General Touch Kongkea, serves as deputy director of the RCAF’s intelligence and research department .

Him Sorsam, who community members say was named in letter No. 1456 to the Ministry of Environment, also serves in the military intelligence department, as a lieutenant colonel , having previously worked as a Nokor Wat Media journalist.

Sophea and Kongkea’s daughters, Kongkea Norphealey and Kongkea Ranaza , were also listed in the letter requesting land from the community forest, alongside Nokor Wat Media deputy director-general Long Molica , Nokor Wat Media journalist Kol Sopha , and Sok Chandara, a lawyer who has filed complaints against community members on behalf of Lin Vatey.

Sophea, Norphealey, Ranaza and Molica are all listed as board members for Preah Vishnu Impex, the parent company of Nokor Wat Media, where Chandara worked as a journalist before practicing law. Chandara’s home address listed by the Cambodian Bar Association matches the residential address listed for Sophea, Norphealey and Rananza in commerce records for Preah Vishnu Impex. Molica’s home address listed in Preah Vishnu Impex’s commerce records matches another residential address given for Sophea in other company listings, suggesting all four share at least two home addresses.

None of the contact details listed in government records for Lin Vatey or the company’s directors were operating when Mongabay attempted to reach out with detailed questions about their activities in Phnom Chum Rok Sat community forest. Similarly, emails and calls to addresses and numbers listed for Chandara , Norphealey and Ranaza by the Cambodian Bar Association went unanswered, and when reporters sent questions over the messaging app Telegram, Chandara deleted them, while Norphealey and Ranaza ignored them.

Silencing critics and clearing out the forest

While sheltering from the rain, Mao explained how he was no longer a member of the Phnom Chum Rok Sat community forest. He’d moved to another village some 50 km (30 mi) away in 2020, but through his work as a journalist for local news and his connections to the community forest committee, he kept an eye on what was happening.

Mao was questioned by military police on June 15. He recalled how plainclothes officers turned up at his house the night before and demanded he attend a meeting about his reporting on the loss of the community forest.

“They brought me a letter and told me I needed to go to the military police headquarters in Stung Treng the following day,” he said. “I was interrogated at 8 a.m. but after they questioned me, they locked me in the room and left me there until 5 p.m.”

The questions pertained to why he had gone to the forest to take photos of excavators working on land that now appears to belong to Lin Vatey and the powerful individuals connected to it.

The community members have been finding logged timber since Lin Vatey began operations in 2022. Image supplied by Ouk Mao.

“I told them that I was only there as a journalist and that the community forest committee had asked me to see what was happening,” Mao said.

He said the committee contacted him in May because he knew the forest and they hoped his reporting could draw attention to the destruction being wrought upon their community forest. They warned him that military police officers were guarding the forest and manning checkpoints to prevent the community from crossing the border.

At the time, the elected leader of the community forest committee was Moeung Ratha, a member of the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) and a former district councilor. “In May, Ratha confiscated timber cut from the community forest by Lin Vatey and he brought it to the community’s ecotourism office,” Mao said. “He had a team of 18 community members helping to transport the timber out to the office. After he did that, he was questioned by military police.”

A few days later, on June 26, Ratha was arrested and sent to pretrial detention on charges of clearing state-owned land, according to documents from the Stung Treng provincial prosecutor seen by Mongabay.

Ratha remains in prison awaiting trial. Other members of the community forest quickly fled.

Lin Vatey's original mining site inside Phnom Chum Rok Sat threatens to consume the entire forest according to documents seen by Mongabay. Image by Gerald Flynn / Mongabay

“Sovanna” previously worked with the community forest and spoke to Mongabay under a pseudonym, citing fears that Lin Vatey would use the local authorities to intimidate critics. These fears appear well-founded. Mao was evicted from his house in July, despite having moved to a different commune in Stung Treng province, and is set to stand trial on Sept. 17 on charges of incitement and clearing state-owned forest.

Sovanna fled Stung Treng province after being questioned by military police and learning that Chandara, one of the lawyers connected to Lin Vatey, had filed a complaint alleging community members had defamed Lin Vatey.

Sovanna said they had been a member of the community forest since 2014, before it was officially recognized in 2017. Back then, they conducted unofficial patrols to preserve the forest and eventually managed to gain the legal recognition needed to form a community forest.

“There were many old, valuable trees, even some rosewood years ago, but now it’s rapidly disappearing,” Sovanna said. “There were huge trees before the community forest was even created, the big trees were why we created the community [forest protection organization] in 2014.”

Overlooking the remaining forest in Phnom Chum Rok Sat sits a small timber depot with recently logged timber scattered about outside. Image by Gerald Flynn / Mongabay.

Another Cambodian forest set to vanish

But the community’s decade of efforts to preserve Phnom Chum Rok Sat have been undermined by Lin Vatey, despite international support.

Phnom Chum Rok Sat’s ecotourism efforts were supported by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) , the United States Agency for International Development (USAID ) and WWF-Cambodia , among other donor partners whose names adorn every sign that details the map of the community forest.

“We saw lots of foreigners coming, they were running some sort of conservation project,” said one farmer who requested anonymity as he lived in close proximity to the community forest and didn’t want himself or his family to be a target of Lin Vatey.

“But the Chinese mining company [Lin Vatey] came in with soldiers and kicked out the foreigners, since then, the forest is disappearing,” the farmer said. “If you’re a foreigner, they won’t let you into the forest anymore. It’s only the employees of the company that can get in, nobody else is allowed.”

The ecotourism ambitions for the Phnom Chum Rok Sat community forest have been dashed by a land grab linked to Lin Vatey. Image by Nehru Pry / Mongabay.

The farmer said many tourists, both domestic and international, had visited the site and that they couldn’t understand why the company needed the whole forest when such a small area was being mined for marble.

“We Kuy people are not allowed to go into the forest, the company owns it now and has taken all of the big trees,” he said. “We know this mountain very well, we used to help [guide] tourists when they visited.”

The buzzing of chainsaws could be heard as the farmer spoke to Mongabay. He shrugged when asked about it.

“We can hear them cutting the timber in the community forest every day and night,” he said. “They’re working all the time to clear the forest, but the Ministry of Environment rangers only ever arrest people trying to clear some land to farm, never the loggers in the community forest. The timber trucks can move freely. This dry season, loggers have taken so much from the forest here.”

Lin Vatey's security staff refused to answer basic questions when Mongabay visited in August 2024, even refusing to say what the company does, despite blocks of marble visible from the checkpoint. Image by Gerald Flynn / Mongabay.

No help coming

The logging looks set to continue as intervention from local authorities seems unlikely while national ministries remain silent on the fate of the forest.

Khom Saram, chief of Sam’Ang commune, where the community forest is located, initially denied anything was happening to the forest, before conceding that numerous concerned residents had complained to him that Lin Vatey had been logging since 2022.

“The community forest has not been dissolved, it still functions,” Saram said when asked about the future of the forest. “I cannot say anything more about this at the moment. We’re seeking a solution and waiting to see how negotiations go.”

Negotiations, he said, were ongoing with the Ministry of Environment, but neither the environment nor mining ministries responded to repeated requests for comment.

Men Kong, the Stung Treng provincial administration’s spokesperson, also denied that anything was happening in the community forest and claimed there was no connection between Lin Vatey and the apparent privatization of land by Lin Vatey’s directors and their families.

The mountainous landscape of Phnom Chum Rok Sat community forest has largely been sold off and its future remains uncertain. Image by Gerald Flynn / Mongabay.

When reporters pointed out the privatized land included the land Lin Vatey is mining, Kong then claimed the land wasn’t part of the community forest. He was then sent the 2017 agreement between the Phnom Chum Rok Sat community and the Forestry Administration.

Kong then said he didn’t have information about the defunct ecotourism venture, Lin Vatey’s checkpoints or the border built around the land requested for privatization, before suggesting that aggrieved residents should complain to local authorities.

“Yes, we had reports from villagers saying there are people started [using] the land [in Phnom Chum Rok Sat],” he responded when asked if he’d received any complaints.

Kong insisted that Lin Vatey was operating legally and that the privatization of 3,064 hectares of the Phnom Chum Rok Sat community forest was legal too, but wouldn’t expand on this or answer questions about the ongoing logging documented by the community and by reporters.

“I’m sad to see the forest gone,” said Mao, who maintained he has the right to document the destruction of the country’s forests as a journalist. “I can see forests are vanishing everywhere in Cambodia, especially over the last five years,” he said.

The forests, he noted, are not just a source of timber for community houses, but serve as a source of water after rainy season, support agriculture, and protect the community against natural disasters.

“I tried to protect them for the nation, not out of any self-interest,” Mao added. “Even the king called on people to protect the forest, so I answered the call.”

Banner image: Lin Vatey has cleared swathes of Phnom Chum Rok Sat community forest as the former ecotourism site has been privatized. Image by Gerald Flynn / Mongabay.

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Impact of Mining Activity on environment: An Overview
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Mining and Its Impact on the Environment Essay
Introduction. Mining is an economic activity capable of supporting the developmental goals of countries and societies. It also ensures that different metals, petroleum, and coal are available to different consumers or companies. Unfortunately, this practice entails excavation or substantial interference of the natural environment.
The Environmental Problems Caused by Mining
The web page discusses the environmental problems caused by mining, such as pollution, water use, land impact and greenhouse gas emissions. It does not provide a direct answer to the query about the least harmful type of mining, but suggests some possible solutions and alternatives.
Impact of Mining Activity on environment: An Overview
Opencast mining contributes towards land. degrad ation, vegetati on degradation destruction of productive land in addition to effecting river flow, siltation, water pollution. ,d efore sta tion ...
How does the environmental impact of mining for clean energy metals
The web page compares the environmental impact of mining for clean energy metals to mining for coal, oil and gas, but does not provide direct answers to the query. It discusses the challenges of comparing different mining methods, the benefits of clean energy in terms of CO2 emissions, and the need for more responsible mining practices.
Understanding the impacts of mining on ecosystem services through a
This article reviews the literature on how mining activities affect the supply, demand, flow and benefits of ecosystem services (ES) for human wellbeing. It focuses on coal mining and finds that mining can have negative or positive effects on different types of ES, depending on the stage of the mining lifecycle and the context of the mining region.
Evidence of the impacts of metal mining and the effectiveness of mining
A systematic map protocol to synthesise evidence of the effects of metal mining on social and environmental systems in the north, and the effectiveness of mitigation measures. The protocol covers a range of positive and negative impacts, and direct and indirect causal linkages, across different mineral types and systems.
Mining and Its Environmental Impacts
The environmental impact of mining is the influence that mining activities have on the natural conditions and world in which humans and all biota live. The impact may involve diverse forms of environmental change or damage, from short- to long-term effects and from highly spatially restricted to long-distance consequences.
How ending mining would change the world
In a world that ended mining, these regions would have the bigger burden of the clean-up projects. With healthy soils and water re-established, though, eventually nature would return to mining ...
Mining and biodiversity: key issues and research needs in conservation
2. The many ways mining activities impact biodiversity. Mining affects biodiversity at multiple spatial scales (site, landscape, regional and global) through direct (i.e. mineral extraction) and indirect processes (via industries supporting mining operations, and external stakeholders who gain access to biodiversity-rich areas as the result of mining).
How to Advance Sustainable Mining
This article explores the impacts of mining on the environment and communities, and the challenges of regulating and improving mining practices. It discusses the role of national and international policies, the benefits and drawbacks of different types of mining, and the examples of good and bad practices.
Mining our green future
The green energy revolution is heavily reliant on raw materials, such as cobalt and lithium, which are currently mainly sourced by mining. We must carefully evaluate acceptable supplies for these ...
Review A review of sustainable mining and resource management
Only papers in English were considered. To narrow the body of works further, papers were only included that specifically discuss a sustainability or sustainable development context for mining, and papers with environmental sustainability focus were emphasized.
Environmental impact of mining
Mining can cause erosion, sinkholes, water pollution, air pollution, and loss of biodiversity at local, regional, and global scales. These impacts can affect the health and well-being of humans and ecosystems, and require strict environmental and rehabilitation codes to mitigate.
Environmental Impacts of the Mining Industry : A literature review
the mining industry namely, the presence of 11 different t ypes of environmental impacts and. each impact (apart from the di scovery of architectural artefacts) cause the environment to be ...
Evaluating the environmental and economic impact of mining for post
Over the years, the impact of mining on the economy, environment, and society has attracted several views (Balasubramanian, 2017; Festin et al., 2018; Mensah et al., 2015; Ocansey, 2013).A study, (Widana, 2019) conceptualized the impacts of mining into several forms such as functionality (socio-economic, political and environment), duration (short-term, medium-term, and long-term), usefulness ...
What Is The Environmental Impact Of The Mining Industry?
Mining affects the environment by causing air, water, and land pollution, as well as loss of biodiversity. The web page explains the sources, effects, and examples of mining-related environmental problems, and the efforts to mitigate them.
Mining is bad for health: a voyage of discovery
The author explores the various ways mining affects health from personal and professional perspectives, including the use of mined elements in daily life, the environmental contamination and degradation, the occupational hazards and the social and economic impacts. The article highlights the challenges and the need for evidence-based solutions to improve mining health.
Mining the Built Environment: Telling the Story of Urban Mining
Urban mining is the exploitation of material stocks accumulated in urban areas, such as construction and demolition waste, to reduce resource depletion and environmental impact. This review paper discusses the concept, benefits, and methods of urban mining, as well as the challenges and opportunities for its implementation.
Mining
Learn about the history, types, and impacts of mining, the process of extracting useful materials from the earth. Find out how mining can harm people and the environment with examples of diseases, pollution, and accidents.
The environmental impacts and sustainable pathways of the global
Mining diamond poses significant and potentially underestimated risks to the environment worldwide. Here, we propose a Diamond Environmental Impacts Estimation (DEIE) model to forecast the ...
Diamond Mining and the Environment: An Analysis of the ...
This essay discusses how diamond mining is harmful for the environment, citing examples of soil disruption, habitat loss, pollution and biodiversity loss. It also explores the debate, ethical considerations and potential for sustainable diamond mining practices.
Overview of Technology and Mining
This chapter provides background information on the importance, exploration, mining, and processing of mineral commodities in the U.S. and worldwide. It also highlights the role of research and development in improving technology and offsetting the adverse effects of mineral-resource depletion.
Review article Understanding the impacts of mining on ecosystem
Here, we review the academic literature examining mining impacts to ES. We found only 60 papers assessed impacts to ES, with the majority focused on coal mining. ... Effective restoration strategies play a crucial role in mitigating the environmental impact of mining and colliery activities while promoting ecological resilience and rejuvenating ...
Why Goa could be the next Wayanad
Mining activities in Goa have significantly contributed to the state's growing environmental crisis. Mining waste has choked open fields and water bodies, contaminating water sources and destroying farmlands. Deforestation for mining has impacted about 350 sq km of forest areas in the Western Ghats, threatening biodiversity and wildlife.
Mining company tied to Cambodian military officials grabs community forest
The Ministry of Environment has so far declined to share or publish the letter, although the new border created inside the forest matches the requested amount of land and a corresponding map seen ...
Arcadium to suspend operations at Western Australia lithium mine
NYSE- and ASX-listed Arcadium Lithium will place its Mt Cattlin spodumene operation, in Western Australia, into care-and-maintenance by the middle of next year, given the continued decline in ...