After the consortium Miller Argent had their proposal for a six-million-tonne open-cast coal mine, Nant Llesg near Rhymney, rejected by Caerphilly council last summer you would have been forgiven for assuming that, after years of the scheme being hotly contested, that was the end of the matter. Not a bit of it.
Report by Guy Shrubsole of Friends of the Earth
In the Northern Territory’s Gulf country, Indigenous residents fear they’re on the cusp of an environmental disaster. They’re calling for the McArthur River Mine, the world’s largest bulk zinc-lead-silver concentrate exporter, owned by the Anglo-Swiss company Glencore, to be closed because its waste rock dump and tailings dam are leaching acid, metals and salts into the McArthur River system.
In Espinar, Cusco, inhabitants of rural communities are living with excessive minerals in their bodies due to mine waste deposits from the old Xstrata Tintaya mine. Now operated by Glencore, this Swiss giant controls 50% of the world’s copper market.
The rhetoric that aluminium smelters – in particular, Rio Tinto Alcan’s facility in Straumsvík – are economically any good for its workers or Iceland as a whole is beginning to unravel.
