Last year, the bipartisan infrastructure law created the first-ever abandoned hard rock recovery program. But no money was set aside to pay for it. To get the money, the proposed legislation would establish a fair royalty for hard rock mining on public lands, one like the royalties set long ago for coal, oil and gas. The royalties would be used to clean up these abandoned mining sites.
The problem is so big that the federal government can’t reclaim the worst of the sites without help. But states, counties, nonprofits and other potential partners in reclamation efforts are hampered by federal laws that treat volunteers who want to help clear abandoned mines as if they were the polluters who created the mess.
One example is the attempt to clear the Lilly/Orphan Boy mine near Helena, Mont., one of several abandoned mines on Telegraph Creek in the Little Blackfoot River Basin. Under a collaboration between the Montana Department of Environmental Quality and Trout Unlimited, toxic mining waste was removed from a floodplain. But the partners couldn’t legally handle the acidic pollution flowing straight from the shuttered mine into the creek without taking responsibility for a mess they didn’t create. As a result, even though the mine was shut down in 1968, pollution continues.
That’s why one of the proposed measures would provide states, counties and nonprofits with carefully prescribed liability protections, enabling these public-private and nonprofit partnerships to begin working at the root of the problem by directly treating toxic spills.
As the United States pursues a transformation to renewable energy, responsible mining plays a vital role. The pandemic revealed major flaws in our reliance on foreign supply chains, and Russia’s war against Ukraine has highlighted the need for safe domestic sources of critical minerals that are the raw materials for clean power generation, electric vehicles and other emerging technologies.
At the same time, we need to invest a fair share of today’s profits in cleaning up the lasting impacts of more than a century of mining on our rivers and streams, fish and wildlife, and communities that depend on clean water and healthy landscapes.
Martin Heinrich, a Democrat, represents New Mexico in the US Senate. Chris Wood is the president and chief executive officer of the conservation group Trout Unlimited.