Dirty Gold

  • Mary Yeboa lives new Newmont's mine - an American gold mining company. (Photo by Anna Boiko-Weyrauch)

Buying a piece of jewelry for
someone is often an emotional
celebration. But some people
are concerned about the damage
caused by mining that gold.
Anna Boiko-Weyrauch takes us from
the jewelry store to the gold mine:

(Research assistance
provided by the Investigative Fund
of the Nation Institute.)

Transcript

Buying a piece of jewelry for
someone is often an emotional
celebration. But some people
are concerned about the damage
caused by mining that gold.
Anna Boiko-Weyrauch takes us from
the jewelry store to the gold mine:

“It is a white gold band, with a star sapphire in the middle.”

In New York City, Sarah Lenigan is showing off her engagement ring. She got married this summer in California. Nowadays some people like her are starting to wonder where the stuff they buy comes from, including their wedding rings.

“You know the idea of the blood diamond, and not just the movie but, you do think about these things when you think about real jewelry. And this is the first time we’ve bought real jewelry, so it was a whole new ball game, I guess.”

It’s hard to say exactly where the gold in Sarah’s ring came from. Gold isn’t like other commodities – it’s almost impossible to track. But more and more, gold like Sarah’s is coming out of Ghana, in West Africa.

(driving sounds)

We’re driving over a dam on the Subri river in Ghana. The country used to be called the Gold Coast and today it’s the second largest producer of gold in Africa. Most of the gold comes out of a number of large surface mines. They’re all owned by companies from abroad.

At this dam, the American gold mining company, Newmont, stores water and waste from its gold mine.

Adusah Yakubu is with me. He’s a member of a local advocacy group. One side of the dam is green forest and clear water. But the other side looks like the surface of the moon.

“It looks like there’s cement in the river. It’s very hard, and it’s very gray. (What is that?) It’s a tailings dam.”

A tailings dam is where mining companies put waste from processing gold. After the precious metal is extracted, you get a mixture of sand and water. It also contains cyanide. Now, the chemical is poisonous, but it’s used all the time in gold mining. And miners work to control it.

But there are also accidents. Some of that waste overflowed this fall at Newmont’s mine, and killed fish downstream. The company says it was a minor event.

For the people who live around Newmont’s mine, the operations have really disrupted their lives. This river used to be the main source of drinking water and food for nearby villages. Kwame Kumah and his wife, Mary Yeboa live by the dam. They say they used to rely on the river for a lot of things.

“There are so many different things we got from the river. You could even get food from it, like fish, crab. But nowadays we can’t get anything from it.”

Now they can’t go near the water because of security guards. Newmont gave the community a well to make up for it. But the villagers say the dam has brought more mosquitoes, and with the mosquitos, disease. Although the company sold them discounted mosquito nets, Mary Yeboa says she gets sick much more than before.

“Right now, my body hurts all over. As I’m talking to you I have a headache, it really hurts. I don’t feel well at all.”

The gold mining company, Newmont declined to comment for this story.

The company sells its gold on the world market. Some people might buy it as investments, others for manufacturing. Or, it could end up as jewelry, like Sarah Lenigan’s engagement ring. That’s actually where most new gold goes, to jewelry.

Soon jewelry consumers, who care about their impact might be able to get some guidance. Certification systems such as the Responsible Jewelry Council are looking at gold, from the mine to the store.

Council CEO, Michael Rae says they are trying to clean up the jewelry business.

“It looks at environmental performance, social performance, labor standards, occupational health and safety, child labor issues and also in business ethics.”

The system won’t guarantee that gold or diamonds are from a specific mine, but it will reveal whether retailers and miners are making an effort to play fair.

Many jewelry and mining companies have signed on to the code. Newmont, the owner of the mine in Ghana we visited, is not a current member.

For The Environment Report, I’m Anna Boiko-Weyrauch.

Related Links

A New Life for Old Phones

  • Recellular employee Myron Woods tests phones to see if they can be resold or re-used. Here, he's got a Nokia 6019, the model reporter Shawn Allee dropped off for recycling. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

It’s pretty clear Americans like their cell phones. On average, we get a new one about every
eighteen months. And yet, we hold on to the old ones, too; the government estimates there’re
about one hundred million lying around in closets and drawers. Shawn Allee found people eager
to take your old phones – if only you’d recycle them:

Transcript

It’s pretty clear Americans like their cell phones. On average, we get a new one about every
eighteen months. And yet, we hold on to the old ones, too; the government estimates there’re
about one hundred million lying around in closets and drawers. Shawn Allee found people eager
to take your old phones – if only you’d recycle them:

I put an old phone in a recycling box a while ago.

I checked around and found it went to one of the nation’s largest phone refurbishers.
It’s a company called Recellular. And it’s based in an old auto parts plant in Dexter, Michigan.

“It’s a big open space with a lot of room to handle the 20,000 phones that come in every day.
You need a lot of benches, you need a lot of cubby holes.”

Vice President Mike Newman points to some incoming collection boxes.

“Every box is a mystery. You have no idea what’s in there until you open it up and start
sorting it out.”

Newman’s company is hunting for working phones to resell here or overseas. Before that, his
people sort and test every model of phone.

And workers like Myron Woods remove personal data.

“Contacts, the voice mails, the ringtones, text messages. Hit OK and the phone’s cleared
out. After that you make sure the phone calls out. You get a ringtone, you hear the
operator, and then you’re done.”

Newman: “In 2008 we processed almost 6 million phones and for 2009, we’re looking at
more than double-digit growth again.”

And of those six million phones, Mike Newman says he can sell about half of them. He’d do
better if people like me didn’t keep phones in drawers for so long.

“The longer you wait, the less value it has so, if you move down from that old phone, as
hard as it might be to part with it, it’s really important to recycle it as soon as possible – it
will do the most good.”

What about Newman’s other phones – the duds? He has a different company near Chicago
recycle them.

Allee: “And here they are … holy mackerel.”

I’m now at Simms Recycling Solutions. A conveyer belt is moving thousands of phones.

“There’s the end of the line for your cell phones.”

Mark Glavin is the VP of operations here. He says there’s gold, silver, and other metals in the
phones he gets from Recellular.

“The cell phones get shredded into somewhat uniform-sized pieces.”

Glavin sticks the pieces in an oven to burn off the plastic – and then grinds what’s left.

Glavin: “That’s what’s left of the cell phones.”

Allee: “It’s almost like the powder you use for a baby, except its black.”

Glavin: “Yes.”

Glavin says there’s gold and other metal in the powder – so metal companies will buy it.

He also has stubborn chunks of metal that won’t grind.

“Those get pulled off and then those go to the furnace room to be melted.”

Glavin: “This is appropriately named the furnace room, where all the melting goes on. It
gets nice and toasty in here in the winter time.”

Allee: “Wow, what are we seeing here?”

Glavin: “After the material has been melted, we’ll cast it into molds and into 30-40 pound
ingots.”

He’ll sell metal from these ingots along with that black powder.

Recellular and Glavin’s company recovers about 96 pounds of gold from its phones each year.

Plus, that gold’s worth more than a million dollars. And recycling saves energy, and prevents
pollution from gold mining.

Glavin says recycling is taking off, and he can always count on people wanting the latest and
greatest phones.

Glavin: “Pretty soon your cell phone will be a chip like, on an ear-ring and a watch, and
there’s nothing to it except for a very tiny electronic.”

Allee: “And people will still swap it for the next one.”

Glavin: “Without a doubt.”

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Chicago Looks to Beijing for Green Olympics Lessons

  • This is not your typical diesel-burning bus. Beijing now boasts the world’s largest fleet running on compressed natural gas. (Photo by Violet Law)

The Olympics in Beijing are into its final week. The city has delivered blue skies and
taken other steps to make the games environmentally friendly. Meanwhile, the City of
Chicago is bidding to host a green Olympics in 2016. The bid committee members are at
the games to observe. Violet Law is in Beijing and has this report:

Transcript

The Olympics in Beijing are into its final week. The city has delivered blue skies and
taken other steps to make the games environmentally friendly. Meanwhile, the City of
Chicago is bidding to host a green Olympics in 2016. The bid committee members are at
the games to observe. Violet Law is in Beijing and has this report:

(sound of a bus pulling up and announcing the stop)

As more Chinese are getting richer they are driving more. But most still catch the bus to
the Olympic venues, because there’s no parking for spectators. Officials have added
special bus routes to take people to the games – for free.

(sound of a bus pulling away)

But this is not your typical diesel-burning bus. Beijing now boasts the world’s largest
fleet running on compressed natural gas. That means less pollution and CO2 emissions.

Doug Arnot is in Beijing. He oversees the planning of operations and sports venues for
Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics. He says Chicago can do even better if it gets to
host the games.

“We believe that by 2016 all of our buses and all of our vehicles in the Olympic fleet will
be alternative energy or hybrid vehicles. That will have a huge impact on the
environmental imprint if you will of the Olympic Games.”

(sound of an English-language announcement of an Olympic venue stop on Beijing
subway and the noise of the train speeding through the tunnel)

Beijing has had to tackle a host of environmental problems. Most people know about the
city’s massive efforts to clean the air. But it also opened five new subway lines just in
time for the Olympics. Its added wind power generators.

But hosting the Olympics might have made one problem worse.

(sound of water fountain)

Beijing already has a water shortage. For the Olympics, workers planted trees and
flowers and added thirsty landscaping all over the city. New parkland and an urban forest
form the bulk of the Olympic Green.

‘Friends of Nature’ is the country’s oldest grassroots environmental group. Zhang Boju is
the head of research. He’s torn over seeing all this greenery.

“We think this grassland and man-made forest is a very, very important part of greener
Beijing, but it also has some problems. Is this fit for Beijing, a city which has limited
water resource?”

Hosting the Olympics has spurred the government to open up new facilities to recycle
water.

Achim Steiner heads the United Nations Environmental Programme. Steiner says he’s
pleased to see that China has seized the opportunity. His agency will issue a report
assessing the environmental impact of the Beijing games by the end of this year.

“What the Olympic Games provided was an opportunity to showcase and create a
platform to demonstrate what is possible if you’re determined to address these issues. A
great deal has been done and shown in the last seven years. What we are looking for here
is what kind of long lasting improvement the Games have brought.”

Beijing will take advantage of all these improvements. All of the newly built venues will
stay. Some, including the iconic Bird’s Nest and Water Cube, will be converted into
commercial use. The wind power generators will produce enough energy for 100,000
families.

There are also small things that show how hosting the Olympics has made Beijing a
greener city. Doug Arnot of the Chicago bid committee is taking notice.

“Every event you go to sometimes it’s not the big idea that you see, but the smaller idea
that you see. One of the things I’ve noticed is the staff and volunteers and the way they
have addressed green issues. They’re very conscious of where the recycling waste
baskets are. That may seem to be a small issue. But when you have tens of thousands of
people at your venues on a daily basis, it is very important.”

And Chicago is hoping both the small things and the big changes in its environmental
approach will win it a chance to host a green Olympics in 2016.

For The Environment Report, this is Violet Law.

Related Links

London Shoots for Low Impact Olympics

  • A projected image of London's Olympic Stadium for the 2012 games (Photo courtesy of London 2012)

There’s been a lot of talk during the Beijing Olympics about China’s

efforts to be more environmentally friendly. The host of the 2012 Summer

games hopes to do even better. Julie Grant reports that London is billing its

Olympics the first low environmental impact games:

Transcript

There’s been a lot of talk during the Beijing Olympics about China’s

efforts to be more environmentally friendly. The host of the 2012 Summer

games hopes to do even better. Julie Grant reports that London is billing its

Olympics the first low environmental impact games:


London already has great sporting venues, so it plans to use places like Wimbledon for the Olympics.

The city doesn’t want to build new facilities that will just sit there after the games are over. Taxpayers in Sydney, Australia, are still paying millions annually for underused facilities built for the 2000 Olympics.

London is building an Olympic Park, but has chosen an old industrial site in a neglected section of East London and hired local workers for the clean up.

90% of the demolition materials have been recycled or reused.

Also, the city doesn’t want the symbol of the games – the flame – to burn fossil fuels and add to the global warming problem. So Olympic officials are searching for a low carbon alternative.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

Related Links

E-Waste Polluting Overseas

  • Exposed to toxic chemicals such as lead and mercury, workers stay at the scrap yards for the $130-a-month pay. (photo by Ted Land)

At your home, chances are your TV, computer and other electronic gear were made
overseas. That’s because it’s cheaper to make them there. And it’s cheaper to get rid of old
electronics overseas. Someday, your old cell phone or CD player might end up right back
where it started: in China. Ted Land visited a Chinese city where electronic waste, or e-waste, is shipped by the thousands of tons. Pollution from that waste is threatening the
health of people who live there:

Transcript

At your home, chances are your TV, computer and other electronic gear were made
overseas. That’s because it’s cheaper to make them there. And it’s cheaper to get rid of old
electronics overseas. Someday, your old cell phone or CD player might end up right back
where it started: in China. Ted Land visited a Chinese city where electronic waste , or e-
waste, is shipped by the thousands of tons. Pollution from that waste is threatening the
health of people who live there:


The city of Taizhou is in eastern China. It’s an industrial port city. A lot of the people
who travel here are here on business. Ships loaded with new products are often headed
for the United States. But it’s not just what leaves this city that makes business boom…
it’s also what’s coming in:


“I know it’s polluted here but it’s not a big deal. The most important thing is my
children, that’s the reason why I found work here.”


Liu Qinzhen works at this Taizhou scrap plant. It’s the final stop for some of the nearly
4,000 tons of scrap and e-waste that enters the port each day. Liu is one of hundreds of
workers who squat under an outdoor pavilion picking apart old circuit boards and wires.
She works 9 hours a day, 7 days a week, earning about 130 dollars a month.


The work is dangerous. She and the other workers are exposed to harmful chemicals
from e-waste such as lead and mercury. The 23-year-old moved here for this job because
she needed to support her two kids:


“I used to work in a shoe factory but then I had a baby and it’s not convenient to have a
baby there so I moved here even though the pay is the same. I come from the countryside.
You can’t earn money on a farm.”


The plant where she works is considered safer than scrapping these materials in the
countryside where families work in their front yards and in their homes. They melt
circuit boards and burn wires to extract bits of valuable copper and gold.


Environmental organizations have documented evidence that what’s left over after the
valuable metals are retrieved is dumped into local rivers and streams:


(Land:) “I noticed when we arrived they shut down the other door of that other shop?


“They are doing the same kind of e-waste, but they are afraid of being discovered by
others.”


Afraid, says Taizhou resident Chen Yijun because what they’re doing is illegal. Chinese
law forbids the import of e-waste, yet piles of foreign electronics litter the countryside
and pour into scrap plants daily.


Yijun is a teacher at Taizhou #1 High School, where students are concerned about what
the e-waste industry is doing to their environment. They’ve been testing the water in
local streams, looking for signs of harmful chemicals:


On this day they draw several gallons from a stream. The banks are littered with piles of
electrical cable. Chen Zhengyan has been working on the project for years:


“The frogs here are different from frogs in other places because sometimes they have
extra limbs. We are sure the pollution is from e-waste because in this area there is no
other industry.”


Chen and her colleagues say this pollution is harmful to people, too. They tell local
government officials such as Liang Xiaoyong that something has to be done to improve
the situation. But, Liang says there’s only so much the government can do to combat an
illegal industry that so many residents make their living off of. He says cutting off the
imports is difficult because sometimes e-waste is hidden in with other scrap. He doesn’t
deny the waste industry is a big business here:


This industry generates a lot of tax money for us in the form of tariffs. So, if this industry
doesn’t exist, the Taizhou harbor won’t survive.


Jim Puckett is coordinator of the Basel Action Network, a Seattle based group that
confronts toxic trade issues around the world. He says it’s not that the Chinese
government is unwilling to stop imports, it’s simply unable to stop them.


“They’ve banned the import, the problem is they can’t control that flow, it’s just coming at
them container load after container load through various ports and they can’t possibly check every
single one.”


American waste is literally fueling the fires burning electronics that dot the countryside in
China. And many of the original owners of this gear had taken it to be recycled, and
thought they’d done the right thing. But, often it ends up on a ship, headed for scrap
yards overseas.


About seven thousand miles away from Taizhou, practically the other side of the globe,
there’s a warehouse in Springfield, Illinois stacked with old electronic gear.


The Illinois State Department of Central Management Services, or CMS, disposes of old
state property, including old copy machines, computers, and monitors. In 2005, CMS
was contacted by the Basel Action Network with some disturbing information. The
group was finding State of Illinois computers dumped in developing countries around the
world. Curtis Howard is manager of CMS state and federal surplus property:


“It hit me pretty hard, the fact that, not realizing, you know I always look at it, these guys
were here, they come in, they bid on our property, you know I’m maximizing the return on
the state’s investment, I’m doing a good job, I never really thought about the tail end of
the dragon.”


Basel Action Network coordinator Jim Puckett says if the Chinese are unable to stop the
imports, then it’s up to the United States to control what they export:


Other countries have laws forbidding it, laws controlling it, but in the United States, we
don’t even have a law to control this export.


The U.S. is one of only a handful of countries that have not signed and ratified the Basel
Convention, an international treaty that bans hazardous waste exports. That means if
anything is going to be done to stop electronic waste from polluting countries overseas,
it’s going to be up to the States to take action.


It starts with buying electronics from companies that make products that are more easily
recycled, and ends with making sure old electronic gear is getting into the hands of
responsible recyclers who don’t simply ship the e-waste to scrap yards overseas.


For the Environment Report, I’m Ted Land.

Related Links

Big City Mayor Pushes “Green” Building

  • Having a plaque like this on the outside of a building means that the construction, materials, and utilities of the building are eco-friendly. "Green" building has started to increase in popularity. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. Green Building Council)

Buildings consume 70 percent of the electricity and create
most of the landfill waste in the U.S. Some cities are looking at “green building” methods to lessen the burden on the environment. The mayor of one major city has set “green” standards for all new buildings, using a mix of mandates and incentives. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Robbie Harris reports on the economic tug of war over building green:

Transcript

Buildings consume 70% of the electricity and create most of the landfill waste in the U.S. Some cities are looking at “green building“ methods to lessen the burden on the environment. The mayor of one major city has set “green” standards for all new buildings, using a mix of mandates and incentives. Robbie Harris reports on the economic tug of war over building green.


(sound of PA system)


Last year, the first green police station opened in Chicago. It will use 20% less energy, and 30% less water than a typical police station. It’s built of recycled and locally available materials. But it looks pretty much like the other newer police stations you see around the city. Officer Jeffrey Bella who has worked here since it opened, says most people have no idea this is what’s known as a “high performance green building.”


“…and the fact that nobody talks about it and nobody notices it is pretty much a testament to how well it does work.”


This is the first police station in the country to earn a LEED Silver rating from the US green building council. LEED – that’s L-E–E-D- for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is a rating system that awards points for features such as energy conservation, site usage, indoor air quality, light pollution reduction, even proximity to public transit. Levels range from basic certification to silver, gold and platinum.


Last spring, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley announced every new building built by the city, must meet basic LEED standards. Private developers aren’t required to meet LEED standards but they must meet the less stringent city Energy conservation code.


Even that has the development community concerned about higher costs. The Mayor had this to say at the Building and Design conference in February.


“Here in the city of Chicago we have to really educate architects, and engineers and I mean you talk about challenges, that alone – and contractors- because they look at money. Money is the source of their profession, like any other profession. How much money… developers, engineers, archiects, contractors, and subcontractors …so green technology to them means money, it doesn’t mean the technology that maybe you and I think about.”


Even the mayor wouldn’t dispute that most LEED certified construction costs more up front. Washington D.C. economist Greg Kats puts it at roughly 2 percent more. Kats ran a performance study of 40 LEED-certified buildings around the country and found higher initial costs were offset ten fold by a variety of benefits.


“And those benefits pay back very quickly in the form of lower energy costs, lower water costs lower operations and maintenance costs, better building operations. And frankly, people are more happy, they’re more productive, kids’ test scores go up, asthma and allergy problem, which is a real concern for a lot of parents like me, tend to go away in green builings.”


On February 14th, one of the city’ largest real estate firms, LR Developers broke ground on what will be the first LEED-certified luxury high rise in Chicago. LR’s Kerry Dixon says, they built green to differentiate themselves in the luxury condo market, and although they’re not required to be LEED certified, they knew it would please the Mayor. But Dixon says it hasn’t exactly been an important selling point.


“We’re not getting feedback from the marketing and sales staff that yeah, everbody’s interested in it.”


If most condo-buyers are not showing much interest in green buildings, more and more large corporations that want to project greener images are.


“We are one of the nation’s largest energy producers. We are by far the nation’s larger operator of nuclear power plants. Some love us for that, and some are skeptical because of that.”


John Rowe is the CEO and chairman of Exelon. The company is looking to consolidate 3 corporate offices into one location and Rowe was fascinated with the idea of building a new green headquarters.


“But it basically worked out so that it would probably be cheaper. And that if we worked on being green we could probably get just as much credit for using an existing building as a new one.”


That’s because the U.S. Green Building Council also certifies commercial interiors. When it’s finished in 2007 Rowe is confident Exelon’s new corporate headquarters will qualify for LEED’s silver rating. He’s hoping it even makes gold.


For now, the Daley administration has chosen to LEED by example – and hope the private sector follows.


For the GLRC, I’m Robbie Harris.

Related Links

Is Algae the Pollution Solution?

A Sea Grant researcher in Ohio has genetically engineered a
single-celled algae to work as a pollution solution. The algae binds
with heavy metals in lakes and then is harvested. The metals are removed
with the algae. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Aileen LeBlanc has
the story: