Metal tariffs could restart landfill mining

Brohm was an Australian company recruited by a now-dead Republican governor who gutted environmental protection in South Dakota. In the pre-cellphone days Brohm and this former Twin City Fruit marketing associate shared a radio telephone party line where managers plotting an environmental disaster at the Gilt Edge site unwittingly leaked the news to anyone listening. 

I've preached this for going on forty years. It takes trucks, tub grinders and balers dedicated to specific materials to recycle on a regional scale. The United States has thousands of mountains of glass cullet from the municipal waste stream just waiting to be repurposed. We sell millions of tons of salvage material to India and Asia to be recycled while tearing up our own ground mining for virgin minerals while metals and plastics, that could be petroleum, are buried in landfills.

Disadvantaged populations have been subject to mining-driven environmental racism for hundreds if not thousands of years and in 2014 Nobel Prize winner, Professor Paul Krugman warned Americans that Earth hating Republicans want to make America one big strip mine. 

In September Sibanye-Stillwater mining company in Montana announced the ending of some 800 jobs after Russia flooded the world palladium market sinking Democratic Senator Jon Tester's reelection. Montana Tunnels Mining, Inc. in Jefferson County is in bankruptcy after a century of pollution and tax fraud.

Currently, the US is 100% reliant on foreign sources of the gallium that's used for integrated circuits and light emitting diodes or LEDs. According to the US Geological Survey the nation imports most of its bauxite and alumina so instead of ripping up ground in America recycling aluminum is mostly working but there is so much metal buried in landfills that if we mined those we'd import even less. Electronic waste containing copper, gold and platinum is valued at nearly $100 billion but only 4% is repurposed while new mines are currently being permitted in Montana and Arizona. 

Today, visitors and skiers at Terry Peak in the occupied Black Hills are increasingly concerned by the encroachment of a massive tailings pile and ever-widening mining scars from decades of scorched earth. But the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming are hardly the only public lands plundered by foreign companies under cover of the General Mining Law of 1872 that was enacted to settle Civil War debt and rob Indigenous peoples of their homes and human rights. 

Until it closed in 1939 the Tererro Mine in the headwaters of the Pecos River took gold, lead and other metals then left piles of toxic waste rock in their place. After major flooding in 1991 when sulfuric acid, aluminum and zinc swept into the river miner Freeport-McMoRan was held responsible for the deaths of some 100,000 Rio Grande cutthroat trout and for the subsequent decades of acid mine drainage.

Learn more from the World Economic Forum.