Locals worry plan to recycle Leadville’s mining waste could threaten Arkansas River, unearth town’s long-buried history – By Jason Blevins (Colorado Sun) / March 29, 2024
Lake County locals have flooded the Colorado mining division with letters opposing a precious metals plan to revive a dormant mill for processing historic mine waste using a vat of cyanide
Nick Michael thinks he has got a great idea. Collect ore and tailings from the slag piles scattered around Leadville, extract bits of silver and gold in a vat of chemicals and then store the waste in a permitted facility.
It’s a plan he’s been simmering since he bought the dormant Leadville Mill in California Gulch in 2008.
“Why create new quarries and mines when we have all this slag and ore we can use?” Michael said. “This is environmental justice and the circular economy.”
The plan is facing fierce opposition from residents in the Upper Arkansas River Valley who are concerned about impacts to the headwaters of the Arkansas River and a return to a mining legacy that the community has spent half a century cleaning up. The Environmental Protection Agency in the 1980s designated the California Gulch area — once home to hundreds of silver, lead and zinc hardrock mines — as a Superfund site, launching an ongoing 50-year cleanup project.
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