Sinivit is on
by Alex
The new “Sinivit gold mine”:http://www.newguineagold.ca/Sinivit.html in East New Britain is now online and their first gold pour is expected for May. For some photos of what the start of a gold mine looks like check out “the press release”:http://www.newguineagold.ca/PressReleases2007.html#apr30. This is Baining, Jane Fajans country but I have no idea what their social impact work was like or how community affairs is constructed or anything.
Looking at these pictures of systematic destruction of the natural environment it occurs to me how desensitized I’ve become to what mining does to the environment. It is sort of like the Rodney King effect — defense attorneys who defended policemen who beat up King had to decide how to deal with the explosive video tape of them beating him. The strategy — iirc — was not to avoid the tape, but to show it to the jury over and over and over again until it was no longer shocking to them. It is sort of amazing to see images of once-forested ridges stripped of all life and ready to get ground into bits and turned into shiny gold bars. Every fork and spoon in our house got dug out of the ground the exact same way. Except, of course, the plastic ones. But anyway.
Not knowing much for a guy as dangerously-overeducated as I am, where _do_ our plastic forks come from? I had always assumed they involved various kinds of reprocessed petroleum products?
Plastics do, at some point in the chain, come out of the ground like our other tangible goods. Polypropylene and polyethylene make up most of your household plastics and they are made from propylene (propane) and ethylene (ethane) via a chemical polymerization. So, your over-education has correctly informed you that petroleum products are reprocessed. Kudos. However, Alex was careful to note that plastics are not dug out of the ground in the same way as metallic ore (i.e. – ore does not need polymerization). Wikipedia has a nice discussion of all the chemicals named.