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Indonesia's tin islands: blessed or cursed?

Written on:October 28, 2008
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Tin mining on these sleepy islands off Sumatra has brought wealth, but at a price; it is literally eating away at the land.

The scale of the environmental damage on the Bangka-Belitung islands can be most clearly seen from the air, revealing a lunar landscape of craters and hundreds of highly acidic, turquoise lakes created by centuries of largely unregulated tin mining.

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