South Africa – Where Climate Change May Trigger a Toxic Timebomb

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http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/11/26-2

We meet Mariette Lieferink in a McDonalds near Gauteng, on the edge of Johannesburg, buying a dozen sickly sweet drinks. She's no one's idea of a leading environmental activist. She wears a tight-fitting, scarlet, embroidered Chinese dress, high heels, and make-up. She is nearly 60, a mother of four, grandmother of two and she used to be a preacher. Now she is head of the Federation for a Sustainable Environment, and works flat out to clean up the massively polluted mining areas of Johannesburg.

Climate change, she says, is a potential disaster for Johannesburg and South Africa, liable to trigger the toxic timebomb left by 120 years of mining.

The city has been the centre of the giant South African mining industry since gold was found there in 1880, and it is surrounded by more than 400 sq m of waste dumps, tailing dams, toxic lakes, radiological hotspots, leaking pipelines, spillages, and gaping holes in the ground. More than 40,000 tonnes of gold has been mined from the Witwatersrand Basin in 120 years, as well as cadmium, uranium, cobalt, copper, zinc, manganese, titanium and other heavy metals.

Lieferink's "toxic tour" starts on the main A28 road. The land we stand on is bright yellow and white, a deep crust of toxic waste from an old copper mine. In front of us is a brickworks making radioactive building blocks from the waste of another mine. In the distance are giant waste heaps from gold mines and below us run the shafts and tunnels of more than 120 deep mines, mostly brim full of millions of litres of some of the most toxic and hazardous waste in the world.

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