Mining and Its Environmental Damage
The currency crisis triggered by the 1997 devaluation of Thailand’s currency spread to surrounding ASEAN countries including the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia, as well as to South Korea, eventually bringing an unprecedented currency, financial, and
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Japan: The Watarase River and its surrounding mountains have yet to recover completely from damage caused by the nearby Ashio copper mine and smelter. Photo: Hata Akio (photographed in September 1996)
A. Takehisa et al. (eds.), The State of the Environment in Asia © Springer-Verlag Tokyo 2003
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1. Introduction1 The currency crisis triggered by the 1997 devaluation of Thailand's currency spread to surrounding ASEAN countries including the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia, as well as to South Korea, eventually bringing an unprecedented currency, financial, and economic crisis to East Asia. But over the approximately 30 years from the second half of the 1960s to that of the 1990s, East Asia achieved rapid economic expansion (which can be characterized as "accelerated industrialization") never before seen in the world, and even now China continues to enjoy high growth. As of 1998 East Asia's population is 3.24 billion, well over half the world's total of 5.73 billion. This rapid economic expansion and continuing population increase in East Asia suggest that trends in this part of the world will determine the fate of the planet's resources and environment. And as The State of the Environment in Asia 199912000 showed, East Asia's accelerated industrialization, explosive urbanization, and emerging mass consumption society are making the region's pollution even worse than in the West and Japan, and amplifying environmental problems that are composites of industrial and urban pollution and environmental damage. Generally there is a close relationship between economic activity and metal consumption, and this tendency is especially pronounced with base metals like iron, aluminum, copper, zinc, and lead. Japan and China illustrate this well, for Japan has the small population of 125 million but the world's highest per capita GDP, while China has expanded economically with the world's highest popUlation of 1.22 billion, and both countries rank among the world's top five consumers of all the abovenamed metals. In terms of 1998 metal production as well, these countries often place among the top five: In iron, China overtook Japan to become first in the world; in zinc, China is first and Japan is third; in lead, China is second and Japan is fifth; in copper, Japan is third and China is fourth; and in aluminum, China is third. From these figures it is evident that East Asia - primarily Japan and China - is a major world metal producing and consuming region. As part III-IS shows, tin is characteristic of and found in great quantity in East Asia. China, Indonesia, and Malaysia are the world's first-, second-, and third-ranked producers, and adding in fifth-ranked Thailand makes up 70% of the world's production. Other metal ore'production volumes ranking among the world's top three are China's iron (first), antimony (first), manganese (first), tungsten (first), rare earths (first; primarily phosphates such as monazite and xenotime), molybdenum (second), bismuth (third), and vanadium (third), as well as India's chromium (third
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