About a week or so ago, I got to go on another trip upstate to the western middle anthracite field. Coal country. The soft bituminous coal that formed when Pennsylvania used to be swampland when it was located near the equator during the Late Mississippian was metamorphosed during the formation of the Appalachian Mountains into the hard anthracite coal that PA is so proud of. It's expensive and slightly cleaner, but there's no clean coal. The following pictures are evidence of that. Strip mine: You can see the iron precipitate around that water in the valley there in the first picture. That's indicative of acid mine drainage. Bad news. Many streams in Pennsylvania have fallen victim to it and can no longer hold life. Like this one... The streams could also end up looking white from excess aluminum or black from manganese. This stream is iron polluted. So with all this talk of mining, it's important to ask ourselves if we, as consumers, are aware of where our belongings come from. Everything's mined from somewhere in order to make all of our stuff. That's easy to forget. Even our collectible healing crystals are mined from somewhere. I have read that mining those has little impact on the environment, mainly because they are collected as by products from many big ticket minerals like the coal above. That makes sense to me, since on our trip we found a bunch of quartz and pyrite minerals amongst the piles of excess. But there's still a good chance that we own products that were produced with minerals that were mined in a way that harmed our planet and possibly other human beings. It's important to be aware that although you may not condone these practices, your money could still be supporting it. Check the rankings of the companies you buy from and see if they are using conflict-free minerals in your products.
3 Comments
Ally
10/7/2013 01:00:55 pm
This is an interesting point to bring up, I never really thought about it in detail where our crystals come from! I knew about blood diamonds but I wonder about all the quartz mines, since there are so many! I looked at those companies and canon is at the bottom. How many of us bloggers have canon cameras!? Thats insane. Even cat litter is really bad for the environment. When I read that I started using shredded paper strips which I had to change a LOT more often but at least got to reuse shredded documents and not have to pay for litter and in turn help the environment somewhat at least.
Reply
ginger
10/7/2013 04:36:09 pm
That's a really good idea about the cat litter, I've never heard of that.
Reply
4/30/2016 01:04:02 am
Hey there, first of all thank you so much for this post and honestly I was searching for the same information from last few days. Keep posting and keep sharing.
Reply
Leave a Reply. |