MINING for metals has occurred for thousands of years. The organisation often described as the oldest corporation in the world, Stora Kopparberg, was a copper mining company, chartered in Sweden in 1347.

Extracting raw material that can be processed and sold as a valuable commodity creates large profits — at the expense of environmental destruction.

Today, the scale of modern mining enabled by machines powered by fossil fuels is staggering.

Most destructive mining today takes place in resource-rich but poor countries.

Global corporations descend to extract wealth, exploiting the situation of weak governments and limited local economic power.

In Mining Capitalism (2014), anthropologist Stuart Kirsch analyses how corporations get away with destroying the environment. His focus is the Ok Tedi copper and goldmine in Papua New Guinea.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s the mine was partially owned by an international mining company, BHP, whose shareholders profited while the mine dumped toxic waste into downstream rivers, poisoning the environment inhabited by tens of thousands of people.

Local indigenous people including the Yonggom organised to take BHP on, including suing them directly.

In 1995, BHP was claiming that this waste was “virtually identical” to natural sediment.

By 1999, when the scale of destruction had become too reputationally toxic for BHP, it changed tack and sought to extricate itself from the mine.

The managing director said that with the benefit of “20/20 hindsight … the mine is not compatible with our environmental values.” 

The company extricated itself, leaving the Papua New Guinean government wholly in charge.

As Kirsch explains in his book, corporations are experts in proclaiming their social values while simultaneously polluting.

Public concern about the colossal consequences of environmental destruction of most raw material production means that the business model of the modern corporation depends on appearing to care.

Corporations externalise the huge costs of mining onto society, portraying them as inevitable, if regrettable, consequences of “modernity.” 

One in particular is the pollution of water. Mining for any mineral means removing large amounts of earth, which must be washed away after treatment to remove the ores, often with toxic chemicals.

Local rivers become soups of sediment and chemicals. Forcing corporations to ensure they remain clear would make mining projects much more costly — perhaps even unprofitable.

The corporate strategy is therefore to play fast and loose, dumping waste quickly into water to make maximum profit, then getting out while they can.

Conveniently, if the environmental devastation they cause is large enough, it can become so vast that in the eyes of society it clearly transcends their ability to clean it up, and thus becomes the state’s problem.

Mining is often increased in countries with civil wars, both because of a lack of government and the quick access it gives to money at a time of chaos.

In sub-Saharan Africa, wars in the 1980s and 1990s were associated with an increase in mining. Since the 1990s, bodies like the World Bank then actively encouraged mining in poor countries, viewing it as a point of leverage to encourage countries with natural resources to open up to foreign investment as part of “structural adjustment programmes.” 

Mining corporations participate in these fictions. As Kirsch recounts, since the late 1990s they have promoted mining as a necessary and even sustainable mode of development to help impoverished regions.

Tropical river mining largely takes place in countries with limited or no effective controls on pollution.

As rivers silt up with the true cost of mining, capital flows away, clean and pure through the rich pulsing veins of the global economy.

In goldmining in particular, mercury and cyanide are used in processing the ore. Yet the environmental rhetoric of the corporation is free of these choking poisons deposited in the mouths of those who drink from the degraded water.

Recent work published in Nature reveals the scale of that degradation: it can be seen from space. A group of researchers based in the United States used satellite images to track the impact of mining on tropical rivers over decades.

The suspended sediment due to mining — often several times higher than natural levels — has a visible trace, changing the colour of rivers from space.

The researchers found that of tropical rivers wider than 50m — usually key for the local water cycle — more than one in 20 have been visibly degraded by mining, polluting the water of hundreds of thousands of people.

Even without additional poisons, the increased presence of this sediment itself is damaging.

The journalist Bryony Walmsley, analysing the paper, explains that the darkened water restricts the penetration of light and the sediments clog things up: from the gills of fish to human dams and weirs. 

The researchers report conclusive evidence for many rivers that it is mining that is responsible, rather than other activities that introduce sediment (such as farming).

In one of the paper’s many analyses, the researchers note that the impact of mining on rivers fluctuates in accordance with the market price of gold.

In the past 15 years the impact has increased — this sort of mining has increased nearly everywhere, with very few exceptions. The researchers note that this is in the context of “increased global insecurity and high demand for precious minerals.”

Today, the Ok Tedi mine is still in operation. It is a complex legacy. Nationalised in 2013 by the Papua New Guinean government, it remains (in the words of its website) a “100 per cent PNG owned company.” 

The company’s annual report claims to be “maximising the value of our mineral resource in an environmentally responsible way.” 

But though there are improved dredges and monitoring, they still deposit 81,000 tonnes of waste into the rivers. The lure of the money that could be generated is irresistible.

What has changed since BHP was in control is that there is now a formal Community Mine Continuation Agreement (CMCA) with local people, encompassing nine mine-affected regions and six mine villages, representing 158 local communities.

As part of the CMCA, some of the money generated by mining is used for compensation payments for the damage of mining — these payments amounted to over £14 million in 2022.

The company is careful to emphasise this as a “collaboration,” with the chairman taking the opportunity of announcing dividends last year to thank them.

As Kirsch notes in his analysis of mining, the underlying dilemmas of capitalist modes of production can never be resolved, but are instead endlessly negotiated.

Though owned by a government, the Ok Tedi corporation continues to perpetuate the lie that their mining is “socially responsible.” 

This week, the mine company judged a “business proposal essay competition” for students on “Solutions to Plastic Pollution.” Its prize? Mining company merchandise.