Ore 3
Environmental Reasons for Recycling Gold
If you were to be able to collect all of the gold which has been mined and extracted from the planet since man began searching for this precious metal, you would have a cube of gold some 22 meters (about 70 feet) along the side – imagine all the gold found since time began is just a cube 70 feet by 70 feet by 70 feet – that fits in a very small office building or a large house.
Shifting, mining, blasting, dissolving in acid, land clearance, people clearance, tons of earth, toxic pollution of billions of gallons of water, and the eradication of numerous species of plant and animal life – all of these things are required in order to extract that relatively small amount of gold.
That doesn’t even count the amounts of energy that have to be used to power all these activities.
The environmental cost of mining and extracting gold is simply fantastically, enormous – which is one reason it is currently trading at $900 an ounce!
Fortunately, there is a simple and very easy-win for those who are environmentally conscious and also want to be rewarded for their green efforts – recycling gold and other precious metals costs a fraction of what it does to extract it from the ground. The vast bulk of the carbon footprint has already been created in getting the gold mined and worked into rings, necklaces, bracelets and other jewelry items.
With a combination of severe recession causing people to look for ways to raise extra money and at the same time, savvy investors looking to invest in gold because the stock market is not a safe place to invest anymore – the price of gold is now historically high and sellers are getting top dollar on their pieces.
Using the following numbers from a “prodcutive” mine, here is how you work out the environmental impact of producing just one little ounce of gold
30 tonnes of ore are required
400 tonnes of earth are required to be shifted to extract the 30 tons of ore
3,000 Kw of electricity are required
4,000 gallons of water are used
Remember – all this just to produce one ounce of the bright shiny stuff!
Though the vast majority of the world’s gold has been extracted since 1910 (all those California gold rushes helped settle the American West but they contributed a tiny drop in the ocean for the world’s gold reserves), it is thought that 85% of the total reserves are still in the ground. While “new” gold is mined worldwide, gold is found on every continent, there is a growing recognition that mining gold is an extremely highly polluting activity and yet so much extracted gold is readily available and sitting in bullion deposit centers such as Fort Knox, KY or the Federal Reserve Bank of New York simply doing nothing!
Recycling existing gold is clearly a very green and very profitable exercise and if ever there was an environmentally sound, win-win situation, selling old gold is definitely it!
