Category: Mining

Bird poop – the original fertilizer

For thousands of years, indigenous populations have used different forms of fertilizer to grow crops. In Latin America and Oceania, the use of excrement, eggshells, and carcasses of seabirds, bats, and seals has helped crops flourish even in poor soil.… Read More

Amber, the fossilized resin of extinct trees has been present in Chiapas, in southeastern Mexico for more than 20 million years. the native people of Chiapas used it as an ornament and, according to folk medicine, it had healing properties.… Read More

With nearly 6 million killed and 3 million internally displaced since 1988 (Consunji, 2014), the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is one of the deadliest in recent history.… Read More

More and more frequently we hear words such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, Monero and Ethereum, digital-based medium of exchange known as ‘cryptocurrencies’. Most often, we hear about the beneficial potentials of cryptocurrency, such as that of not being controlled by any central authority, but working primarily as a decentralized, peer-to-peer network of exchange, recorded and produced by the cryptocurrency community as a whole (Krishnan et al.… Read More

In 2019, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to Professors Goodenough, Whittingham and Yoshino for developing the lithium-ion battery. The lithium-ion battery is an important leap in mobility, storage, and perhaps human innovation, given that human lives (in urban centres at least) are today centred around electricity.… Read More

Blue Sapphire, among one of the big three precious coloured gemstones, is a variety of the mineral conundrum consisting of Aluminium Oxide. Sri Lanka (or Ceylon), also referred as the Gems Island, is not only the steadiest producer of Blue Sapphires, but the mines here are the oldest in the world and their exports have been in existence for more than 2500 years.… Read More

Development

The term Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) appeared more than 50 years ago in Howard Bowen’s publication: Social Responsibilities of the Businessmen (1953). The term has evolved for years, but there is an overall understanding among scholars that CSR is the result of the moral obligation that companies have within the society in which they operate.… Read More

In India, mining for sand is as valuable as mining for gold. This is due to large-scale urbanization and rapid construction which is the primary industry that this sand is used in.… Read More

Production of Asbestos is one of the most controversial natural resource extractions due to its impact on humans, as the material is widely considered as a toxin. Since the asbestos controversy from the late 1980s to the 1990s, most industrialized countries have banned asbestos.… Read More