• Mining

    • Mining gives us the stuff we need to produce energy, houses, cars, computers, and thousands of other products. But mining can be nasty business.

    • Mining

  • Resources extracted from Earth

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  • tons
  • globally, this year

    • It’s mined for your sake

    On average everyone uses 16 kilos of resources extracted from earth every day - metal, fossil energy, and minerals. If you live in the western world this number is much higher - up to 57 kilos of newly-mined minerals per day.

    It goes into your products

    Telephones, for example, are made from as many as 42 different minerals, including aluminum, beryllium, coal, copper, gold, iron, limestone, silica, silver, talc and wollastonite. A television requires 35 different minerals, and a computer more than 30.

    Lifetime supply

    A newborn infant will need: 360 kilos of lead, 340 kilos of zinc, 680 kilos of copper, 1,630 kilos of aluminum, 14,800 kilos of iron, and 560,000 kilos of stone, sand, gravel and cement. Check out this video to know more about how the extraction of resources from Earth fits into our consumption of stuff.

    Numbers are going up

    Production of mined metal commodities is expected to increase by 250 percent by 2030. Most of this will originate from small and medium-sized mining operators, particularly in developing countries…

    Increased negative impacts

    …small and medium-sized mining operators often lack the know-how and resources to apply sufficient health and environmental safeguards. The environmental impacts of mining is therefore likely to increase.

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