Evaporating water supply poses costly risk for miners

High in Chile’s bone-dry Atacama desert, mining engineer Enrique Miranda surveys a metal structure filled with a pungent mix of earthworms and woodchips. Sprinklers inside the enclosure snap to life, shooting waste water from the nearby mining camp into the wriggling mass, which serves as a natural filter.

“That’s lunch for the worms,” says Miranda, an environmental supervisor who has worked at Barrick Gold Corp’s Zaldivar copper mine for 18 years.

via Business feed http://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/1249700/evaporating-water-supply-poses-costly-risk-miners