Tag Archives: artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM)

Appalling Human Rights Violations in South Africa Mining Sector

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With hundreds of miners trapped below ground without food or water, two men from down the road volunteered to venture where no police, government officials or professional rescuers were willing to go.

On their first descent into the shaft this week, Mandla Charles and Mzwandile Mkwayi, wearing white hardhats, headlamps and T-shirts, stepped out of a red cage dangling on a cable from a crane on the surface 4,200 feet above them. Their lights illuminated a sea of emaciated faces, men crowded into a chamber who were crying and pleading to be saved from the pitch black of the abandoned Buffelsfontein gold mine. The miners’ lights had burned out weeks or months earlier. The volunteers made more than 30 round trips underground over the next three days, bringing up 246 living prospectors and the remains of 78 more. The cage, designed to hold six people in close confinement, lifted as many as 13 men to the surface on some trips.

“I can’t explain the smell down there,” Charles, 38, told The Wall Street Journal at the mine entrance in Stilfontein, 100 miles southwest of Johannesburg. “They told us they were eating human flesh and cockroaches. They had lost hope.” The rescue mission, which concluded January 16,2025 when no more survivors could be found, ended a monthslong standoff between miners who had been illegally digging for gold and a government determined to force them to the surface. The miners had been holed up since the police cut off their supplies of food and water in August 2024. 

For about five months, the informal workers were trapped underground as police tried to “smoke them out,” in the words of Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, minister in the South African presidency. The operation was part of the police’s “Close the Hole” plan to combat illegal mining, which has reached crisis levels here. A staggering 42% unemployment rate in South Africa has led to high levels of chronic poverty, leaving many men with little choice but to clamber down gold shafts closed by some of the world’s biggest mining companies, in order to feed their families. The zama zamas are often the lowest-level workers for larger criminal gangs that ultimately sell the gold abroad.

Excerpts from Alexandra Wexler, Hundreds of Miners Were Trapped for Months—Until an Extraordinary Two-Man Rescue Mission, WSJ, Jan. 17, 2025

How to Kill People 8 000 Feet Below Ground

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The South Africa’ government has been trying to starve out 1,000 informal prospectors so as to force them out of the Buffelsfontein mine, which extends some 8,000 feet below ground. For months in 2024, police have been sealing most entrances to the tunnels, blocking food and water deliveries and stationing guards at remaining exits to arrest any miners who make their way to the surface. In recent days, nearly 1,200 have surrendered. Police estimate that hundreds of men remain below, but it isn’t clear if they are unwilling or unable to reach the surface.

The operation is part of what police call their “Close the Hole” plan to combat illegal mining, an acute problem in what was once the gold-mining capital of the world. The South African government estimates that illegal gold mining costs the country the equivalent of over $3.8 billion a year in lost revenue, and is often associated with a jump in violent crime in nearby communities and an influx of migrants from neighboring countries… Facing a 42% unemployment rate, impoverished South Africans and migrants from nearby countries pry open sealed entrances and venture thousands of feet underground to try their luck. Locals call the men zama zamas, a Zulu phrase meaning “take a chance.”

Whole ecosystems exist below ground, with entrepreneurs selling miners everything from soda to toothpaste to sex.  The miners in Stilfontein, 100 miles southwest of Johannesburg, are suffering from hunger and dehydration, according to police. Industry experts say the zama zamas are often the lowest-level workers for larger criminal gangs that ultimately sell the gold abroad. Those who have migrated from elsewhere are sometimes victims of abuse, forced to work underground to pay off debts. Police said most miners who emerge will be charged with crimes and imprisoned or deported. 

Excerpt from Alexandra Wexler, The Standoff Deep Inside an Abandoned South African Gold Mine, WSJ, Nov. 15, 2024

The Real Price for ‘Green’ Energy

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Civilization would not exist were it not for miners. Every year the world’s oldest industry supplies hundreds of megatons of the primary metals and minerals that are essential to all subsequent industries—from medical devices to kitchen appliances, aircraft, toys, power plants, computers and cars. Hence it’s consequential when the governments of Europe and the U.S. implement policies requiring that global mining expand, and soon, by 400% to 7,000%. Those policies are meant to force a transition away from the oil, natural gas and coal that supply 80% of global energy. But it’s an unavoidable fact that building the favored transition machines—wind turbines, solar panels, electric cars—will require astonishing quantities of minerals to produce the same amount of energy.

The other challenge involves people. Mining has always been as much about people as it has about geology, technology and money. In “The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives,” Ernest Scheyder highlights the myriad difficulties faced by the people who build mines, as well as those hurt by or opposed to them. As Mr. Scheyder notes, mining is “dirty work.” That’s no invective; it’s just reality…He focuses on the social and political dynamics that accompany big mining projects because, as he writes, there’s “no way around the fact that mines are gargantuan creations that maim the Earth’s surface.” He makes clear that his goal isn’t to question the need for more mines but to understand “whether these lands should be dug up in an attempt to defuse climate change,” especially when some lands are considered sacred by their neighbors and inhabitants.

Excerpts, ‘Mark P. Mills, The War Below’ Review: Digging for Minerals, WSJ, Mar. 3, 2024

Ecological Impacts of Mining Rivers for Gold

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Mining in river channels provides a living for millions of people across the globe, particularly in the tropics. However, because this mining involves deforestation, excavating, dredging, and other work directly in or next to river channels, ecosystems are intensively degraded. Soils and river sediments excavated during mining are processed to extract the precious mineral of interest, usually gold, then discarded. Often the excess sand, silt, and clay is washed downstream by rivers, muddying river water for as much as 1,000 km downstream of mining sites. 

During the past 20 years, mining in rivers has increased dramatically, particularly during the Global Financial Crisis in 2008–09 when the price of gold increased significantly. Despite the human and ecological importance of mining-related environmental degradation, no global documentation of its environmental footprint exists. For the first time these environmental impacts were quantified through the use of satellite imagery and on-the-ground measurements, documenting more than 400 mining areas in 49 countries, mostly in the tropics. We show that the effects of mining have altered 173 rivers, which collectively represent 5–7% of large river length globally. In the tropical countries with river mining, on average nearly one-quarter of large river length is altered by river mining. 

Abstract Available online The recent rise of mining in rivers is a global crisis (Evan Dethier et al, 2022)

Human and Environmental Costs of Low-Carbon Technologies

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Substantial amounts of raw materials will be required to build new low-carbon energy devices and infrastructure.  Such materials include cobalt, copper, lithium, cadmium, and rare earth elements (REEs)—needed for technologies such as solar photovoltaics, batteries, electric vehicle (EV) motors, wind turbines, fuel cells, and nuclear reactors…  A majority of the world’s cobalt is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a country struggling to recover from years of armed conflict…Owing to a lack of preventative strategies and measures such as drilling with water and proper exhaust ventilation, many cobalt miners have extremely high levels of toxic metals in their body and are at risk of developing respiratory illness, heart disease, or cancer.

In addition, mining frequently results in severe environmental impacts and community dislocation. Moreover, metal production itself is energy intensive and difficult to decarbonize. Mining for copper,and mining for lithium has been criticized in Chile for depleting local groundwater resources across the Atacama Desert, destroying fragile ecosystems, and converting meadows and lagoons into salt flats. The extraction, crushing, refining, and processing of cadmium can pose risks such as groundwater or food contamination or worker exposure to hazardous chemicals. REE extraction in China has resulted  threatens rural groundwater aquifers as well as rivers and streams.

Although large-scale mining is often economically efficient, it has limited employment potential, only set to worsen with the recent arrival of fully automated mines. Even where there is relative political stability and stricter regulatory regimes in place, there can still be serious environmental failures, as exemplified by the recent global rise in dam failures at settling ponds for mine tailings. The level of distrust of extractive industries has even led to countrywide moratoria on all new mining projects, such as in El Salvador and the Philippines.

Traditional labor-intensive mechanisms of mining that involve less mechanization are called artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM). Although ASM is not immune from poor governance or environmental harm, it provides livelihood potential for at least 40 million people worldwide…. It is also usually more strongly embedded in local and national economies than foreign-owned, large-scale mining, with a greater level of value retained and distributed within the country. Diversifying mineral supply chains to allow for greater coexistence of small- and large-scale operations is needed. Yet, efforts to incorporate artisanal miners into the formal economy have often resulted in a scarcity of permits awarded, exorbitant costs for miners to legalize their operations, and extremely lengthy and bureaucratic processes for registration….There needs to be a focus on policies that recognize ASM’s livelihood potential in areas of extreme poverty. The recent decision of the London Metals Exchange to have a policy of “nondiscrimination” toward ASM is a positive sign in this regard.

A great deal of attention has focused on fostering transparency and accountability of mineral mining by means of voluntary traceability or even “ethical minerals” schemes. International groups, including Amnesty International, the United Nations, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, have all called on mining companies to ensure that supply chains are not sourced from mines that involve illegal labor and/or child labor.

Traceability schemes, however, may be impossible to fully enforce in practice and could, in the extreme, merely become an exercise in public relations rather than improved governance and outcomes for miners…. Paramount among these is an acknowledgment that traceability schemes offer a largely technical solution to profoundly political problems and that these political issues cannot be circumvented or ignored if meaningful solutions for workers are to be found. Traceability schemes ultimately will have value if the market and consumers trust their authenticity and there are few potential opportunities for leakage in the system…

Extended producer responsibility (EPR) is a framework that stipulates that producers are responsible for the entire lifespan of a product, including at the end of its usefulness. EPR would, in particular, shift responsibility for collecting the valuable resource streams and materials inside used electronics from users or waste managers to the companies that produce the devices. EPR holds producers responsible for their products at the end of their useful life and encourages durability, extended product lifetimes, and designs that are easy to reuse, repair, or recover materials from. A successful EPR program known as PV Cycle has been in place in Europe for photovoltaics for about a decade and has helped drive a new market in used photovoltaics that has seen 30,000 metric tons of material recycled.

Benjamin K. Sovacool et al., Sustainable minerals and metals for a low-carbon future, Science, Jan. 3, 2020