Goldmining on the Artic Circle

Man has always been fascinated by gold. Fear of inflation and unstable financial markets has triggered increased demand and goldmining is a more lucrative business than ever. The Arctic Circle region is no exception. The main goldmining company is Boliden, a Swedish firm with mines in Sweden, Finland and Ireland. Gold was first discovered in the Swedish town of Skelleftea in the 1920s, and today is home to one of the biggest smelting plants in the world. We spent a day with workers to find out how gold is mined. We also find out how Boliden is holding out against competition in Canada, South Africa ,the US and Australia. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- The yellow metal is highly sought-after again. Much of the world's gold comes from mines in southern Africa or Asia. But this gold comes from the far north of Europe. At the Renström Mine, the Swedish gold diggers have a good relationship with manager Sunniva Haugen. She spends as much time as possible inside the mine. The trip down to the pit takes 10 minutes. At first glance there's no gold to be seen. Mining work is dangerous. Sunniva Haugen checks that safety rules are being followed. Stones can break loose at any moment. Sunniva Haugen: "Here, this dark stone is our favourite. It contains the most gold and lots of zinc. The other one - this shiny one has much less gold." The shafts reach down to 1300 meters below the ground. The miners have to dig into deeper rock layers to find any gold at all. That costs money - which the manager has to allocate. "We miners earn too little. Our wages haven't risen in comparison to the 1980s - now they're standing still." Sunniva Haugen: "The wage groups that used to earn less than miners earn more today. In those brackets there were wage adjustments." Since Sunniva Haugen became the boss she has increased production levels. The machines now transport a quarter million tonnes of rock to the surface - 25 percent more than five years ago.To see if the new batch contains enough gold ore, it is sent to the enrichment plant. There the chunks of rock are milled, and the gold is washed out. There's a taste of metal in the air here. Much of the rock that the miners used to discard can now be exploited - but often only with the help of toxic chemicals. Ronnie Furberg, head of the Enrichment Plant: "I'm not worried about my health - you just have to be careful with the chemicals. At Boliden we're world leaders in terms of environmental impact. We recycle half the water and the other half goes into our cleaning plant. We do constant air measurements and we are always trying to improve." What remains after the enrichment treatment is gold dust, which is transported to the smelter. In the glory days, prospectors used to extract 17 grams of gold from a tonne of rock. Now it's just three grams per tonne. Boliden has had to invest and search for new areas to exploit. That is good news for Sunniva Haugen's colleague, Peter Olsson. He heads the gold production at the Rönnskär smelting works and he's got an eye on HIS profit margin. He has already begun to collaborate with mines that are not part of the Boliden concern. Olssen says: "The pit is one thing, but for our smelters the most important thing is to utilize our full capacity, so as to process as much gold dust as possible." The smelter where Peter Olsson works is also in the gold-rich region around the Arctic Circle - where the first prospectors built their settlements around 80 years ago. At the moment the area is seeing a second Gold Rush. Since the gold price jumped, domestic firms as well as international concerns have been vying for mining rights. Peter Olsson monitors every step of the melting process. The jewellery sector is the main customer - and it is quite demanding. But the workers here have lots of smelting experience. Mats Fredriksson is a Gold Melter, he says: "I judge it by eye - around 13 kilos in every bar." The weight is spot-on. The melter's experience has paid off again. Boliden's high-quality gold has made the concern Europe's biggest producer of the precious metal. The smelters in Rönnskär are hoping to conquer world markets with what they consider the goldmine of the future - recycling. These bars already contain some reprocessed gold - and who knows, perhaps it was excavated here in northern Sweden.

DW-World | December 4, 2007

Tags:. .begun. .adjustments. .recycling. .recycle. .fascinated