getting wasted
first, a happy new year to all of you out there in the land of apes. gotta get something up here for this month, so here goes.
my views on the diamond industry have been expressed in this space before, but this past week's expose in the NYTimes has revealed the seamy underbelly of the gold industry as well. the lede will give your the gist of it, but read the whole article to really get your dander up:
The closest most people will ever get to remote Papua, or the operations of Freeport-McMoRan, is a computer tour using Google Earth to swoop down over the rain forests and glacier-capped mountains where the American company mines the world's largest gold reserve.
With a few taps on a keyboard, satellite images quickly reveal the deepening spiral that Freeport has bored out of its Grasberg mine as it pursues a virtually bottomless store of gold hidden inside. They also show a spreading soot-colored bruise of almost a billion tons of mine waste that the New Orleans-based company has dumped directly into a jungle river of what had been one of the world's last untouched landscapes.
What is far harder to discern is the intricate web of political and military ties that have helped shield Freeport from the rising pressures that other gold miners have faced to clean up their practices. Only lightly touched by a scant regulatory regime, and cloaked in the protection of the military, Freeport has managed to maintain a nearly impenetrable redoubt on the easternmost Indonesian province as it taps one of the country's richest assets.
so essentially, my feelings are that the entire jewelry industry is built on lies; either the lies that the companies are telling those regulating them, the lies the companies are marketing to get you to shell out hundreds and thousands and millions of dollars, or the lies that you're telling yourself and your loved ones about the state of purity of the jewelry itself, or the purity of feeling that the jewelry represents. perhaps that's an extremely cynical statement for this yearly time of renewal and hope, but these companies rival any others you could name in terms of evil in the service of profit, with the possible exception of those bastards at Genocide and Rape, Inc.
mining waste is one of the biggest sources of pollution in the U.S. and the world, as the byproducts of the extraction and refining processes result in the creation of acids and dangerous heavy metal compounds, especially those that contain lead and mercury. this page has more information on this, but here's the critical part: "The metal mining industry reported the largest total release of toxic chemicals, accounting for 45 percent of the nation's total, followed by the electric utilities industries with 17 percent and the chemical industry with 9.5 percent."
yet how often do we ever hear about the mining industry and its regulation or lack thereof? this points to the continuing importance of setting a goal of "Zero Waste" to reduce the waste stream and recapture and reuse all kinds of usable materials (especially the metals used in the electronics and the like), rather than continuing to send them to landfills and incinerators where they do nothing except sit there, or else leach into the water table. earlier this year, Seattle set a Zero Waste goal for itself, and there are groups working to adopt similar goals for New York. for ways that you can help achieve this goal in the coming months, go to NYCWastele$$ for lots of great ways to prevent waste before it becomes a problem.