Rare earth waste is reaching Myanmar’s Irrawaddy River and no one is measuring it

Mizzima

Zung Ting, a Kachin environmental advocate who has documented Myanmar’s mining impact for over two decades, told an international conference in Chiang Mai, Thailand that waste from hundreds of rare earth mines is already flowing into the Irrawaddy River, while Myanmar has no monitoring system capable of measuring how far the contamination has spread.

Presenting remotely to a panel on rare earth mining at the 5th International Conference on Burma Studies, held 14–16 August, Zung Ting said only one substantive water study had been carried out in the mining region, conducted with Naresuan University at sites upstream near Pangwa and Chipwi. “I’m very sure our Irrawaddy River is really, really toxic already,” he said, an inference drawn from the volume of chemicals used rather than from measurement.

Myanmar’s rivers carry the same category of waste over a great distance. The Irrawaddy runs the length of the country from Kachin State to the Andaman Sea, and the mining belt sits directly in its headwaters. Zung Ting said fish populations in streams he knew from childhood have collapsed to a fraction of their former diversity, an observation he offered as one of the few available indicators in the absence of laboratory data.