BHPBILLITON/

The following excerpt comes from today’s Sunday Boston Globe.

NEWMAN, Australia – Here in this land of searing heat, scrub, and eucalyptus, a land so vast that road signs warn the next gas station is 600 miles away, Mount Whaleback was once 1,500 feet high. Today it’s a hole, the biggest open-pit iron ore mine in the world – an entire mountain crushed, sold, and shipped to China.

Trucks with tires twice the height of a grown man cart thousands of tons of raw ore to a processing plant, where it is separated and poured into the longest and heaviest train in the world – 336 freight cars pulled by six locomotives. It chugs 300 miles to Port Hedland, where it is loaded onto ships bound for the unquenchable steel mills of the People’s Republic.

Ton by ton, China is buying Australia. One of the world’s most staggeringly huge transfers of natural resources has both enriched and alarmed Australia, prompted a determined response from Washington, and illustrated both China’s savvy and ungainliness as it aggressively expands its influence around the world.

Frankly – and this is one reason we’re posting this – is that we don’t know the environmental impact of this mining technique.

There’s a bit about this online – for example this snippet from Wikipedia:

“Environmental issues can include erosion, formation of sinkholes, loss of biodiversity, and contamination of soil, groundwater and surface water[1] Besides creating environmental damage, the contamination resulting from leakage of chemicals also affect the health of the local population.[2] Mining companies in some countries are required to follow environmental and rehabilitation codes, ensuring the area mined is returned to close to its original state. Some mining methods may have significant environmental and public health effects.” by chemicals from mining processes. In some cases, additional forest logging is done in the vicinity of mines to increase the available room for the storage of the created debris and soil.

We did some further research and found the responsible company – BHP Billiton, and their sustainability framework and some data about their overall effect on the environment… you can read their full sustainability framework here, and below we provide a couple of charts that illustrate the huge numbers involved (you would think so, since this involves the demolition of a mountain).

bhp env stats 2bhp env stats

The grey arrows indicate the trend is worse year-to-year.
For some local flavor about the mining operations, we suggest these links.

http://www.kiwihyde.com/?p=68

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtA0p09SE6o&feature=related

We’re interested in hearing from you about the environmental impacts of this type of mining, especially considering the numbers above.
Comments?  Enlightenment?  We’re listening…

VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: +1 (from 1 vote)