S African gold miners gun for mining firms

These “garbage” mountains have up to now received very little attention from the gold mining industry. They have done little record keeping on how much of this is out there or what the ore grades are. All their calculation efforts have been on what they were making money with. About the only groups tabulating any numbers on them are the environmentalists, who view them as second only to nuclear waste dumps as a threat to mankind. But they are dormant threats, whereas the open-pit mines of today are the active version of this threat. The threat stems from the fact that the most economical way to separate gold from a heap of ore, as is generated by open-pit mining, is to drizzle cyanide over it and channel the gold bearing solution to a separation plant. This heap leaching is fairly safe if proper leach pads are built and the ore is properly put on them and processed. But the possibility of accidents and abuse with something like cyanide stirs the fervor of any environmentalist worth their sodium chloride. They have been about the only ones paying any attention to these man-made mountains of gold.
http://firstinvest.co.uk/gold/?p=129