Gold: The dark truth behind your jewelry

Why is mining gold one of the world's most destructive industries? From Ancient Egypt to today, the precious metal has held a special value in society. Can the industry clean itself up or should we get less precious about this particular metal?

Credits
Reporter: Louise Osborne
Video Editor: David Jacobi
Supervising Editor: Kiyo Dörrer, Joanna Gottschalk & Michael Trobridge

Special thanks to the Deutsche Bundesbank for photos.

We're destroying our environment at an alarming rate. But it doesn't need to be this way. Our new channel Planet A explores the shift towards an eco-friendly world — and challenges our ideas about what dealing with climate change means. We look at the big and the small: What we can do and how the system needs to change. Every Friday we'll take a truly global look at how to get us out of this mess.

#PlanetA #Gold #SustainableMining

Read more:

Earthworks: Impacts of dirty gold on communities: https://earthworks.org/issues/dirty-g...

The clinical importance of the mercury problem in artisanal small-scale gold mining https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...

Capturing coupled riparian and coastal disturbance from industrial mining using cloud-resilient satellite time series analysis: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep3...

A pantropical assessment of deforestation caused by industrial mining: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas...

World Gold Council: A Modern Day Gold Mine

Risk of tailings dams failure: https://izw.baw.de/e-medien/geotechni...

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:50 A golden history
01:47 How gold is used today
02:48 Industrial gold
05:48 Small-scale mining
07:00 Effect on indigenous communities
08:39 The actual worth of gold
10:57 Recycling gold
11:56 "Better" gold?
14:03 Conclusion: a way forward