Unearthing Justice

How to Protect Your Community from the Mining Industry

Joan Kuyek

• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781771134521
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Natural Resource Extraction Industry
• Index: Business

The mining industry continues to be at the forefront of colonial dispossession around the world. It controls information about its intrinsic costs and benefits, propagates myths about its contribution to the economy, shapes government policy and regulation, and deals ruthlessly with its opponents.

Brimming with case studies, anecdotes, resources, and illustrations, Unearthing Justice exposes the mining process and its externalized impacts on the environment, Indigenous Peoples, communities, workers, and governments. But, most importantly, the book shows how people are fighting back. Whether it is to stop a mine before it starts, to get an abandoned mine cleaned up, to change laws and policy, or to mount a campaign to influence investors, Unearthing Justice is an essential handbook for anyone trying to protect the places and people they love.

Part I

What Mining Looks Like

The chapters in this section are a tough but essential read. They describe the physical impact of mining, starting with the enormous environmental footprint of an operating mine in chapter 1.

The next chapter describes how mining and smelting actually happen, from the staking of a claim through construction and operations to the mine’s closure. The operations of the mine include a description of how the desired metals and gems are removed from the host rock, and what happens to the wastes after their removal.

Next, the key environmental impacts on water, air, and land at different stages of mining are discussed.

1

The Physical Footprint of a Mine

I am flying over Sudbury on a clear autumn day. I can see the city and the surrounding towns, the roads and railways, power lines, rivers, lakes, and hills. But I also see three huge turquoise and rusty-orange tailings lakes (one thirty-five square kilometres in size), the Glencore and Vale smelters, and the old refineries. Everywhere there are blackened slag heaps and waste rock piles. A number of open-pit mines dot the surface, as do the head frames of underground mines. Smoke streams from the superstack. From this height, I am aware of how much the footprint of these mines has grown since my last flight just a few years ago. Despite reclamation and re-greening programs, the mines and their wastes are quickly devouring the landscape.

The mining industry likes to say that mines are just “a little hole in the ground”¹ and are a “temporary use of the land.”² This is not true. This chapter provides an overview of the extent of the footprint of an operating mine and offers some important definitions for understanding mining.

The minerals and gems we mine are the product of movements of the earth’s crust over billions of years. Although they are scattered in various concentrations everywhere in the earth’s rocks, to be concentrated into deposits that are economically viable, they have undergone dramatic heating, cooling, and gravity separation. Metals have different weights and different specific gravity. As the earth’s crust dances with the shifting of tectonic plates, the eruption of volcanoes, the impact of meteorites, and the cooling effects of water, mineral deposits—of gold, copper, uranium, zinc, diamonds—are formed.

We call these deposits ore bodies.

To get to the ore body, the mining company will have to displace any people from the land where the mine will be built, then remove the overburden—the trees, plants, and soil—covering it, and then remove the rock surrounding or covering the ore body.

The amount of desired metals or gems in the ore body is called the grade. Depending on what metal or gem you are talking about, this may be shown as grams per ton or ounces per ton (for gold), a percentage of the metal in the ore body (copper), or carats per ton (diamonds). In Canada and elsewhere, the grade of ore has been decreasing as deposits that are profitable to mine are being used up. It used to be that copper grade had to be 4 to 5 percent and gold grade 5 grams per ton (gpt) before it was considered worth mining. But now the Gibraltar Mine in British Columbia has ore with a copper grade of 0.26 percent and a molybdenum grade of 0.008 percent; the Mount Milligan Mine (also in British Columbia) grades 0.19 percent for copper and 0.3 gpt for gold.

Mining is a waste management industry. The process creates an extremely high volume of waste: the overburden, the waste rock that is removed to get to the ore, and the ore body that has been crushed into powder at the mill and rejected, called tailings. Some mines dispose of almost 100 percent of the rock they smash up, along with various chemicals that are added in the course of extracting the minerals. The volume will definitely be larger than it was before mining because of the blasting and milling process.

Mining is a rapid, ferocious, and continuous assault on the earth. A mine’s footprint gets bigger every day it operates. Although it may take a long time to get permits, financing, plans, and equipment in place to start operating (something the industry complains loudly about), once the company has all this, a new road and a few holes in the ground can become a two-kilometre-wide, five-hundred-metre-deep open pit within a few years. In ten to fifteen years, the deposit will likely be mined out and the mine will be closed. Unless, of course, the company discovers a new ore body nearby, and then the process will continue.

Mining happens in two main ways: underground mines and open pits (or a combination of the two). The type of mine is determined by the nature of the ore body. If the ore body is concentrated, then underground mining may be possible. If, however, it is dispersed and low grade, an open pit is the only economic option for the company.

The tunnels and shafts of underground mines can extend for kilometres under old mining districts like Timmins and Sudbury, and will go down until the ore runs out or until heat from the centre of the earth makes it impossible to continue. The Kidd Mine in Timmins is the world’s deepest base-metal mine below sea level, with a mine that is almost three kilometres deep.

Open-pit mines are among the largest human-made structures on earth. The Bingham Canyon Mine, located southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah, in production since 1906, is the deepest open-pit mine in the world and is more than 1.2 kilometres deep and approximately 4 kilometres wide. The Dome Mine open pit in Timmins removed over 286 million tons of gold-bearing rock over more than one hundred years to create a hole 340 metres deep and 800 to 900 metres across.

Diamonds are found in “kimberlite pipes,” carrot-shaped intrusions into the earth’s crust of magma from deep in the earth, where carbon from ancient forests has been trapped and compressed into diamonds. Two diamond mine complexes, Ekati and Diavik, are both located in the Lac de Gras area of the Northwest Territories, about three hundred kilometres north of Yellowknife. Ekati was the first diamond mine in Canada, and it started mining its first pipe in 1998. Just twenty years later, it has six open pits and three underground mines. The mine itself is only one part of the footprint, as the following section illustrates.

The Diavik Footprint

The Diavik Diamond Mine in the Northwest Territories is one of the largest open-pit mines in the world and provides an excellent example of the awesome size of open-pit mines.³

Situated on an island in Lac de Gras in the Northwest Territories, the mine has produced roughly eight million carats a year since it opened in 2003. It consists of three open pits (with another being developed).

Satellite image of the Northwest Territories’ Diavik Diamond Mine.
Image from Planet Labs, Inc., 2016. Creative Commons 4.0 License.

The slope of pit walls is a major concern for mine engineers as the walls have to be designed so that the rock benches don’t collapse or slide. Most pit walls cannot withstand an angle greater than forty to forty-five degrees from horizontal. As a result, the radius of the pit gets bigger and bigger the deeper it goes.⁴ At a certain point, the mine can only be continued with underground tunnels. When Diavik faced this problem in 2012, the mine’s life was extended with further mining underground.

The waste from the pits—waste rock that is not used for road and dike construction—is stored in processed kimberlite piles (tailings) and in waste rock dumps.

[To get at the kimberlite pipes under Lac de Gras specially designed dikes had to be built to hold the water back. The lake had to be dredged], placing several million tons of crushed rock into the lake to create the dikes themselves, anchoring the dikes to the bedrock, transferring fish from the enclosed areas back into the lake, and removing several million cubic meters of water from the enclosed areas. . . .

The two initial crushed-rock dikes . . . [surrounding the first two pipes] total more than five kilometers in length. They stand as high as 32 meters above the lake bed and are wide enough to allow two large vehicles to pass one another. The dikes were constructed using 4.5 million tonnes of granite waste rock.

[Located 300 kilometres northeast of Yellowknife in the Barrens of the Northwest Territories,] the mine must operate as a self-contained community. [As of 2017], the site covers 10.5 square kilometers and contains a dormitory complex, a dining area, recreational and education facilities, an office and maintenance building, a warehouse, and an enclosed maintenance facility where even the largest hauling trucks used at the mine can be worked on year-round. Emergency response and medical services are also available.⁵

The complex also houses a processing plant, power and boiler plants, fuel tanks, and water and sewage processing facilities. An explosives plant and storage facility are also on site. It is serviced by a six-hundred-kilometre ice road built by the owners of the Ekati and Diavik mines.⁶ The Diavik airport, with a 1,600-metre gravel runway, is big enough for a Boeing 737 jet. Power is largely provided by diesel generators; a wind farm provides 11 percent of the energy requirements.⁷

Like Diavik, all mines extend their physical impact beyond the mine site through roads, power lines, railways, and ports. They may require hydro dams and the creation of large reservoirs to get their power. They are major producers of greenhouse gases, and major users of water.

Roads are often the most serious problem created by a mine. They can affect animal and plant distribution, kill many animals, and create impassable barriers for others. In addition to habitat loss, roads also enable exotic species to invade and out-compete native plants. They create an “edge effect” that can cha...