Death metal: tin mining in Indonesia
If you own a mobile, it's probably held together by tin from the Indonesian island of Bangka. Mining is wrecking the environment and every year it claims dozens more lives
Official figures show that mining accidents have quadrupled in the past two years, with the number of deaths increasing from 21 in 2010 to 44 in 2011. But activists say the number of dead actually averages around 100-150 every year, with many cases going unreported.
Suge doesn't have a mobile phone, so he uses a friend's to tell us the news: he doesn't want any visitors and he won't talk. His boss has told him not to say anything. They're neighbours and the mine's just up the road and he needs this job – the job he hopes to go back to when he gets better, inshallah – because mining is good money. Everything is OK. Just please don't come.
Official figures show that mining accidents have quadrupled in the past two years, with the number of deaths increasing from 21 in 2010 to 44 in 2011. But activists say the number of dead actually averages around 100-150 every year, with many cases going unreported.
Suge doesn't have a mobile phone, so he uses a friend's to tell us the news: he doesn't want any visitors and he won't talk. His boss has told him not to say anything. They're neighbours and the mine's just up the road and he needs this job – the job he hopes to go back to when he gets better, inshallah – because mining is good money. Everything is OK. Just please don't come.
We leave at dawn. In the black morning sky the two-lane highway cuts west across the island towards Suge's village, a cluster of wooden and cinderblock houses near mangroves so deep the palm trees look like drowned bonsais. There are mosques with orange gates and lime roofs, clapboard shacks selling sweets to schoolchildren, and then, every so often, vast expanses of seeming desert.
At the bottom of the sandy dunes sit wide turquoise craters, looked over by gritty hills where haphazard tents made from tarpaulins and thatch serve as shelters for the men descending into the hollowed-out pools with pickaxes and buckets. Fifteen metres deep, they scavenge for tin, cutting into the sand with their hands and feet, just like Suge used to do, until one day in August his pit collapsed, burying him alive and snapping his left shin in half. His cries of "Longsor! Longsor!" – Landslide! – were drowned by the mud that killed the three friends who had been working beside him.
The tin that 44-year-old Suge has mined over the past 12 years onBangka island – a granite outcrop just east of Sumatra in Indonesia – has been in heavy demand for the past few centuries. Bangka is a key point in its global trade. A long, boot-shaped belt of the metal stretches from Burma all the way down through Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, with Bangka and its sister island Belitung comprising its toe.
When the Dutch colonised Indonesia in the early 19th century, one of their first tasks was to carve out vast mines on the island where locals and Chinese coolies worked side by side digging for dark specks of cassiterite – the main mineral in tin ore – to be used in alloys, conductors and tin plating. Today that same tin is mined for use primarily as solder in consumer electronics, according to tin industry group ITRI, holding together the circuit boards, transistors and resistors in items such as smartphones and tablets and mobiles. Around seven grams of tin goes into every mobile phone.
There is a chain here: Bangka and Belitung produce 90% of Indonesia's tin, and Indonesia is the world's second-largest exporter of the metal. A recent Businessweek investigation into tin mining in Bangka found that Indonesia's national tin corporation, PT Timah, supplies companies such as Samsung directly.. Read more:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/nov/23/tin-mining-indonesia-bangka
