The Dangers of Deep Sea Mining

“Sea mining. In the UN Law of the Sea Conferences that took place from 1973 to the early 1980s, they started talking about scraping the ocean floor for strategic metals used in computers and other things. At one time, the university here was talking about using tailings from some of these mineral mining processes to grow food, to use as fertilizer.

Tailings are the materials left over after they separate valuable metals out from the unsellable part of an ore. Well, some of this mining produces 98 percent tailings and they are toxic! Then, at one point they were talking about dumping this toxic waste in a fifty-mile long trench in the ocean floor that ended right outside Hilo Harbor.

Right off the coastline! Now, the waste from mining and processing these ores for valuable metals like nickel produces poisonous by-products like cadmium, arsenic, and thallium. A  pinpoint head of thallium is enough to kill you! So, we opposed this in Hilo.

This issue is still being talked about, so please watch out for it. It’s been discussed for different parts of the Pacific and off the coast of Kona. Strip-mining the ocean floor is a killer. We were able to kill it in Hilo in the late 1970s, but it continues to come back and rear its head.

-          Aunty Moanike’ala Akaka from Na Wahine Koa

ʻŌiwi Leaders Firmly Rebuke Deep Sea Mining

https://kawaiola.news/aina/%ca%bboiwi-leaders-firmly-rebuke-deep-sea-mining/

Deep-Sea Mining: Exploiting our Oceans in the Name of Clean Energy

https://kawaiola.news/aina/deep-sea-mining-exploiting-our-oceans-in-the-name-of-clean-energy/