[OKC] Green Gold

[Miles, Karen]

Green Gold


Are all wedding bands bad for the environment?

By Nina Shen Rastogi 
 
 
 
Last month, you explained why green consumers should be cautious when
buying diamonds and gemstones <http://www.slate.com/id/2262003/> . What
if I wanted to buy my wife a simple gold band? What kind of
environmental impacts would that have?
 
A gold band may be the ultimate in effortless style, but it takes a lot
of work to produce one. Forget any 49er
<http://pbskids.org/wayback/goldrush/journey.html>  fantasies you may
have of nuggets glittering in riverbeds-most gold these days comes from
large open-pit mines, where huge amounts of rock are churned up to
extract tiny flecks of precious metal. A "rich" mine might contain just
a few tenths of an ounce of gold per ton of ore; a "poor" one would have
a few hundredths of an ounce per ton. The mining watchdog group
Earthworks estimates that a standard 18-karat wedding band leaves behind
20 tons of ore and waste rock
<http://www.nodirtygold.org/pubs/20TonsMemo_FINAL.pdf>  (PDF). 
 
Is there such a thing as an environmentally friendly gold ring? Moving
that much earth doesn't just require a lot of energy. It can also lead
to toxic mine drainage-probably the biggest environmental concern
associated with gold-mining. When you dig up rock that's been buried for
a long time, air and moisture can set off various chemical reactions
that produce acids and leach toxic metals. If those substances-sulfuric
acid, arsenic, and copper, for example-run off into lakes, rivers, and
streams, they will pose serious risks for populations of fish and other
aquatic organisms. Mine drainage is a problem for many kinds of
operations, but it's especially significant for gold extraction. For one
thing, gold is often found in rock that happens to contain a lot of
acid-generating sulfides, and for another, mining gold produces so much
more unwanted rock than does mining other minerals. 
 
Once you start extracting the gold from the ore, a new set of issues
arise. Take mercury, for example. The element, which has been linked to 
a host of negative health effects
<http://www.epa.gov/mercury/effects.htm> , is found in many metal and
coal deposits. Large-scale gold operations often start processing ore by
roasting it, which can have the unwanted side effect of shooting a lot
of mercury into the atmosphere. (The same thing happens at coal-burning
power plants, the source of about half the United States' airborne
mercury emissions <http://www.epa.gov/mercury/about.htm>  in 2005.) 
 
 
Article continues at: http://www.slate.com/id/2267359/pagenum/all/
 
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