A plan to extract gold from mining waste splits a Colorado town with a legacy of pollution
Piles of mine waste that loom above the historic Colorado mountain town of Leadville are a reminder of the city’s boom days
LEADVILLE, Colo. — Rust-colored piles of mine waste and sun-bleached wooden derricks loom above the historic Colorado mountain town of Leadville — a legacy of gold and silver mines polluting the Arkansas River basin more than a century after the city's boom days.
Enter a fledgling company called CJK Milling that wants to “remine” some of the waste piles to squeeze more gold from ore discarded decades ago when it was less valuable. The waste would be trucked to a nearby mill, crushed to powder and bathed in cyanide to extract trace amounts of precious metals.
The proposal comes amid surging global interest in re-processing waste containing discarded minerals that have grown more valuable over time and can now be more readily removed. These include precious metals and minerals used for renewable energy that many countries including the U.S. are scrambling to secure.
Backers say the Leadville proposal would speed cleanup work that’s languished for decades under federal oversight with no foreseeable end. They speak in aspirational tones of a “circular economy” for mining where leftovers get repurposed.
Yet for some residents and officials, reviving the city's depressed mining industry and stirring up waste piles harkens to a polluted past, when the Arkansas was harmful to fish and at times ran red with waste from Leadville’s mines.
“We're sitting in a river that 20 years ago fish couldn't survive," Brice Karsh, who owns a fishing ranch downstream of the proposed mill, said as he threw fish pellets into a pool teeming with rainbow trout. “Why go backward? Why risk it?”
Leadville – home to about 2,600
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