Depends what you call it really.
Research by the British charity CAFOD claims that some community leaders in Macambol, on the southern island of Mindanao, were bribed up to £12,000 – thirty-two times a typical annual salary – to approve the scheme.
Reads differently if you call it compensation funnelled through the community leaders, doesn’t it?
Still, the bit that interested me was this:
The mine will use a new method of extracting the nickel using hot sulphuric acid.
Called, I think, heat leaching. Been tried out in Australia a few times. Depends upon what exactly the ore is but when the process has been used in Oz a possible byproduct has been….scandium!
Hurrah!
3 responses so far ↓
1 marksany // Oct 23, 2008 at 10:00 am
That’s good news for the Lacrosse stick industry.
2 gene berman // Oct 23, 2008 at 11:38 pm
There are both “heat leaching” and the far more common “heap leaching.” More or less, it’s all heap leaching but I think the “heat leaching” refers to cases in which the process is heat-enhanced by using an available geothermal energy source. Anyone know for sure?
3 gene berman // Oct 23, 2008 at 11:41 pm
I guess you could call heap leaching an example of getting rich by the “trickle-down” method.
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