Today's hard rock mining industry often leaks cyanide, endangering the environment, wildlife, and humans.

What is cyanide?

Cyanide is a rapidly acting and potentially deadly chemical substance.

Cyanide "can refer to any of various compounds containing a chemical group CN: one carbon atom (C) and one nitrogen atom (N). Because it is an organic substance, it is easy to react with organisms.

Cyanide is easily bound to many metals, making it useful in separating metals such as gold from ores.

How is cyanide (cyanide formula) used in mining?

Sodium cyanide solution is usually used to leach gold from ores. There are two types of leaching:

Heap leaching: In the open air, cyanide solution is sprayed onto a pile of crushed ore on a huge collection pad. Cyanide dissolves the gold in the ore into a solution, causing it to leach out from the ore. The pad collects a solution of current metal impregnation, which is stripped of gold and re sprayed onto the pile until the ore is depleted.

Large barrel (or tank) leaching: Mixing ore with cyanide solution in a large tank. Although the likelihood of leakage is low as the leaching process is more controlled, the resulting waste, i.e. tailings, is stored behind large dams (tailings reservoirs) that may and do experience catastrophic failure.

The efficiency of cyanide makes mining more wasteful

Because cyanide leaching is very effective, it allows for profitable extraction of low-grade ores.

Extracting lower grade ore requires extracting and processing more ore to obtain the same amount of gold. Part of the reason is cyanide, modern mines

Much larger than before the use of cyanide;

Create huge open pits; and

Generate a large amount of waste.

In order to manufacture a regular ring, it is necessary to generate over 20 tons of mining waste.