Intelligent approaches to mining ethics

EDITORIAL

Mining-industry folks calmly reading over their New York Times on the morning before Valentine’s Day will have been forgiven if they choked on their Cap’n Crunch after stumbling across the latest full-page “No Dirty Gold” ad proclaiming that “gold mining is one of the dirtiest industries in the world.”

This particular ad featured a heart-shaped gold pendant inset with photos depicting a mine with a “danger: cyanide” sign and a boy shovelling dirt in some bleak, Third-World setting. The headline message: “There’s nothing romantic about a toxic gold mine.”

If you’re not already familiar with the shameless, two-year-old “No Dirty Gold” smear job against gold miners, it’s a co-production of the radical, leftist, anti-mining group Earthworks and the U.S. wing of Oxfam. The partners’ modus operandi is to recycle the techniques of the successful “blood diamonds” campaign of years past. It’s simple: they lean on the jewelry industry by threatening to instigate consumer boycotts of their products if jewellers don’t get with the “No Dirty Gold” program.

Trouble is, apart from the lofty goal of raising more funds to keep themselves in cushy Washington, D.C. offices, there’s very little substance behind the peddlers of “No Dirty Gold.” They certainly offer no realistic solutions to the negative effects of gold mining.

A look through No Dirty Gold’s material quickly reveals the defining characteristics of the campaign: a deep, willful ignorance of the mining industry; a wild misunderstanding of both toxicity and risk assessment; and an intellectually dishonest decision to focus on the very worst mining events of the past few decades, distort the facts, and then portray this distortion as typical of the industry.

If you don’t believe us, let’s pull some whoppers from the No Dirty Gold campaign’s centrepiece report, “Dirty Metals: Mining, Communities and Environment”:

* In the cyanide-leaching process, the “cyanide-contaminated waste ore is usually just abandoned;”

* An open-pit mine “generates huge piles of waste rock, which leach toxic metals and acid;”

* Given the “scale and duration of these (heap-leach) operations, contamination of the surrounding environment with cyanide is almost inevitable;”

* A “substantial share of mining deaths go unrecorded;”

* Heavy dependence on mining “correlates strongly with a wide range of serious social problems, such as high levels of poverty, low levels of education, and poor health care;”

* The aftermath of a large-scale mining operation is “generally a landscape of devastation: thousands of hectares poisoned, rubble-strewn land drained by acidified streams that will likely remain too polluted to support their full complement of life for thousands of years to come;” and

* Gold to make a ring “generates on average 20 tons of toxic waste.”

Those are some of the words. How about the deeds? Well, here’s an example: Instead of doing an honest day’s work, or at least improving its shoddy research, the No Dirty Gold group is today spending its time urging its supporters to harass U.S. pop songstress Alicia Keys for her love of gold jewelry and support of the industry as a spokeswoman for the World Gold Council.

Unfortunately, the distortions of the No Dirty Gold campaigners have fooled a few heavyweights into becoming supporters, the most-respectable being Missouri-based jeweller Helzberg Diamonds, a subsidiary of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.

But clearly, if any mining people are innocently giving charitable donations to Oxfam International, unaware that they’re being stabbed in the back by this organization, they should cease immediately and redirect their dollars to a more sensible charity.

If the people running the No Dirty Gold campaign truly aimed to help society’s weakest and improve the environment, they would be directing most of their attention to the biggest polluters in the gold industry, who also happen to be the poorest of the poor. The millions of small-scale miners around the world who use mercury amalgamation to recover gold from their ore are the worst polluters, and badly need to move towards the far more environmentally benign cyanide-recovery method.

Thankfully, an intelligent approach to tackling the real ethical issues facing the gold industry is coming from the Council for Responsible Jewellery Practices (CRJP), a non-profit organization formed last spring and based in London.

Headed by CEO Michael L. Rae (formerly of the World Wildlife Federation) and program director Santiago Porto, the council has quickly grown to 27 members representing a cross-section of the leading “mine-to-retail” gold and diamond businesses, whose activities span the world.

The CRJP’s mining members are BHP Billiton, De Beers’ Diamond Trading Co., Newmont Mining, Placer Dome and Rio Tinto. Downstream members include ABN Amro, the American Gem Society, Cartier, Jewelers of America, LVMH, Piaget, Signet Group, the National Association of Goldsmiths, Tiffany & Co., and Zale.

The council is developing a “responsible practices framework” that members must apply to their businesses to ensure high standards of ethical, social and environmental behaviour, with room for third-party monitoring.

For example, members are pledging to adhere to the Kimberley Process Certification System and the World Diamond Council voluntary system of warranties, as well as the conventions of the International Labour Organization.

While the CRJP is still in its infancy, it’s clearly a much better way forward than the hysterics of No Dirty Gold.