141 You can’t assess the full environmental impact of mining just by looking at the hole left in the ground.
These pictures show the area around the Centinela copper mine, and the huge “tailings” ponds that surround
the site. After the copper is separated from rock, the unwanted materials remain in the form of slurry
(tailings, in industry terminology), which collects in pools, hemmed in by dams, that Maisel describes
as “vast beyond comprehension”. Tailings can contain toxic metals such as arsenic and mercury. In January
2019, a tailings dam at an iron-ore mine in Brazil collapsed, killing at least 248 people. As of this
June, the facilities at the mine pictured here held 154 million cubic metres of tailings. � Amit Katwala11-19-FTlithium.indd 115 20/08/2019 12:48