VISTA Training has a fascinating 18-minute informational video entitled It’s Yours, It’s Mined. This is a tool any company involved in mining could make good use of. For local schools and service organisations it’s an ideal community educational and PR item. TV stations are always looking for these scenes for file footage. When it is permit time for a new project several copies would be a smart investment.
Pass this on to non mining industry friends. “If it’s not grown, it’s mined” is a saying we’ve all heard, or variations on it. For all practical purposes every single component of your computer (on which you are reading this) originated in a mine, even if many plastic chemicals came from oil. Your wood or metal desk was either grown or mined. Even if it is wood, it was cut with metals. Desk hardware, including the chemicals used to make the plastic parts, was mined. Paper started off as a tree. The raw material for glass is mined. Carpets may be naturally grown fibers; petroleum based artificial fiber or both. Your morning orange juice was grown, the container it came in may have been grown or mined or a combination of both. The juice may have been calcium carbonate fortified …. from a mine. Your breakfast cereal was grown, but eaten with a metal spoon from a clay based bowl. The spoon and bowl originated in a mine.
Mining throughout the world often gets unfairly pilloried. Unfortunately, in some cases, the bad rap is deserved. But mining in most major industrial countries is now regulated to assure land restoration when extraction of the mined material is complete. You would be hard pressed to imagine the number of practical uses of restored mine sites. An old underground limestone mine near St Louis in the US is used as a food warehouse benefiting from the constant temperature without artificial refrigeration. Some challenging golf courses have been built from mined-out aggregate mines. Hundreds of community swimming facilities with beaches were once quarries. Beautifully landscaped housing developments with ponds bear little resemblance to the aggregate or other types of mines they once were.
When we begin to examine our day-to-day existence we start to realise how important mining is in our lives. Try this exercise with some of your co-workers and family members. It’s fun and educational. Point to any object and ask if the material that makes it up was grown or mined. Even if it’s an article of cotton clothing it may have a metal or plastic zipper. We challenge you to find some object in your life that was not either grown or mined. The answer to the question who benefits; is EVERYONE. Mining, like agriculture and forestry, provides jobs and the base materials that improve all of our lives in virtually millions of ways. [email protected]
