• Mining

    • Mining gives us the stuff we need to produce energy, houses, cars, computers, and thousands of other products. But mining can be nasty business.

    • Mining

  • Killed miners

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  • deaths
  • globally, this year

    • Mining is deadly

    Mining kills and injures more people than any other work in the world. More than 15,000 miners are killed every year - and this is just the official number of deaths. Most likely, it's many more.

    ...and crippling

    Nobody really knows how many people are injured in mining, but it is likely to be hundreds of thousands of people every year.

    It’s destroying lives

    In Bolivia, the average miner in the tin mines of Potosí will live only 35 to 40 years - a life more than 25 years shorter than the average Bolivian person. At least 300,000 children as young as 5 work in Columbian mines.

    The children suffer

    Almost all children in the Peruvian town of La Oroya have dangerously high levels of lead, arsenic and other toxins in their blood. More than 40% of the children under 5 have mental deficiencies. The cause is the town's heavy pollution from lead, zinc and copper mining.

    We are all part of it

    The western world receives large quantities of mined minerals from small scale mining operators in developing countries.

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