Mining in Africa

Still, once Eritrea’s first mine runs out of ore it faces a major problem in dealing with the mines “tailings pond”, actually a massive reservoir of cyanide and acid polluted water, the by product of the process used to extract the gold and base metals from the ore. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of barrels of “slurry”, toxic and very, very difficult to treat.
In most of Africa, in the rest of the world really, the multinational mining barons just walk away from this problem, taking their super profits with them. This is not going to happen in Eritrea. First of all the “tailings pond” has to be built right. A densely compacted base of gravel is laid down, similar to a heavy duty road
bed and then covered with not one, but two layers of acid resistant rubber.
http://www.spyghana.com/mining-africa/