Bangkok, Thailand – A surge in uncommon earth mining in rebel-held pockets of Myanmar supplying Chinese language processing crops is being blamed for poisonous ranges of heavy metals in Thai waterways, together with the Mekong River.
China dominates the worldwide refining of uncommon earth metals – key inputs in every little thing from wind generators to superior missile programs – however imports a lot of its uncooked materials from neighbouring Myanmar, the place the mines have been blamed for poisoning native communities.
Current satellite tv for pc photos and water pattern testing recommend the mines are spreading, together with the environmental injury they trigger.
“Because the mining operation began, there is no such thing as a safety for the native folks,” Sai Hor Hseng, a spokesman on the Shan Human Rights Basis, an area advocacy group primarily based in japanese Myanmar’s Shan state, instructed Al Jazeera.
“They don’t care what occurs to the surroundings,” he stated, or these residing downstream of the mines in Thailand.
An estimated 1,500 folks rallied in northern Thailand’s Chiang Rai province in June, urging the Thai authorities and China to strain the mining operators in Myanmar to cease polluting their rivers.
Villagers in Chiang Rai first seen an odd orange-yellow tint to the Kok River – a tributary of the Mekong that enters Thailand from Myanmar – earlier than the beginning of this yr’s wet season in Could.
Repeated rounds of testing by Thai authorities since then have discovered ranges of arsenic and lead within the river a number of occasions increased than what the World Well being Group (WHO) deems secure.
Thai authorities suggested locals residing alongside the Kok to not even contact the water, whereas exams have additionally discovered extra arsenic ranges within the Sai River, one other tributary of the Mekong that flows from Myanmar into Thailand, in addition to within the Mekong’s mainstream.
Locals are actually apprehensive concerning the hurt that contaminated water might do to their crops, their livestock and themselves.
Arsenic is infamously poisonous.
Medical research have linked long-term human publicity to excessive ranges of the chemical to neurological issues, organ failure and most cancers.
“This must be solved proper now; it can’t wait till the following technology, for the infants to be deformed or no matter,” Pianporn Deetes, Southeast Asia marketing campaign director on the advocacy group Worldwide Rivers, instructed Al Jazeera.
“Individuals are involved additionally concerning the irrigation, as a result of … (they’re) now utilizing the rivers – the water from the Kok River and the Sai River – for his or her rice paddies, and it’s an vital crop for the inhabitants right here,” Pianporn stated.
“We realized from different areas already … that this sort of exercise mustn’t occur within the upstream of the water supply of one million folks,” she stated.
A satellite tv for pc picture of a uncommon earths mine web site on the west aspect of the Kok River in Myanmar’s Shan state, as seen on Could 6, 2025 (Courtesy of the Shan Human Rights Basis)
‘An excellent correlation’
Thai authorities blame upstream mining in Myanmar for the poisonous rivers, however they’ve been imprecise concerning the precise supply or sources.
Rights teams and environmental activists say the mine websites are nestled in pockets of Shan state beneath the management of the United Wa State Military (UWSA), a well-armed, secretive insurgent group that runs two semi-autonomous enclaves within the space, one bordering China and the opposite Thailand.
That makes the websites onerous to entry. Not even Myanmar’s army regime dares to ship troops into UWSA-held territory.
Whereas some have blamed the current river air pollution on the UWSA’s gold mines, the newest exams in Thailand lay many of the fault on the mining of uncommon earth minerals.
In a examine commissioned by the Thai authorities, Tanapon Phenrat, an affiliate professor of civil engineering at Naresuan College, took seven water samples from the Kok and surrounding rivers in early June.
Tanapon instructed Al Jazeera that the samples collected closest to the border with Myanmar confirmed the best ranges of heavy metals and confirmed that the supply of the contamination lay upstream of Thailand in Shan state.
Mekong River Fee (MRC) workers take a water pattern for testing from the Mekong River alongside the Thai-Laos border on June 10, 2025 (Courtesy of the MRC)
Considerably, Tanapon stated, the water samples contained the identical “fingerprint” of heavy metals, and in roughly the identical concentrations, as had earlier water samples from Myanmar’s Kachin State, north of Shan, the place uncommon earth mining has been thriving for the previous decade.
“We in contrast that with the concentrations we discovered within the Kok River, and we discovered that it has an excellent correlation,” Tanapon stated.
“Concentrations within the Kok River might be attributed about 60 to 70 p.c … (to) uncommon earth mining,” he added.
The presence of uncommon earth mines alongside the Kok River in Myanmar was first uncovered by the Shan Human Rights Basis in Could.
Satellite tv for pc photos obtainable on Google Earth confirmed two new mine websites contained in the UWSA’s enclave on the Thai border developed over the previous one to 2 years – one on the western slope of the river, one other on the east.
The inspiration additionally used satellite tv for pc photos to establish what it stated are one other 26 uncommon earth mines contained in the UWSA’s enclave subsequent to China.
All however three of these mines had been constructed over the previous few years, and plenty of are situated on the headwaters of the Loei River, yet one more tributary of the Mekong.
Researchers who’ve studied Myanmar’s uncommon earth mining trade say the massive, spherical mineral assortment swimming pools seen within the satellite tv for pc photos give the websites away as uncommon earth mines.
The Shan Human Rights Basis says villagers residing close to the brand new mines in Shan state have additionally instructed how employees there are scooping up a pasty white powder from the gathering swimming pools, simply as they’ve seen in on-line movies of the uncommon earth mines additional north in Kachin.
Two males stand inside the gathering pool of a uncommon earths mine in Kachin state, Myanmar, in February 2022 (Courtesy of World Witness)
‘Zero environmental monitoring’
Patrick Meehan, a lecturer on the College of Manchester within the UK who has studied Myanmar’s uncommon earth mines, stated reviews rising from Shan state match with what he is aware of of comparable operations in Kachin.
“The way in which firms are likely to function in Myanmar is that there’s zero pre-mining environmental evaluation, zero environmental monitoring, and there are none of these types of laws or protections in place,” Meehan stated.
The leaching course of getting used includes pumping chemical compounds into the hillsides to attract the uncommon earth metals out of the rock. That watery combination of chemical compounds and minerals is then pumped out of the bottom and into the gathering swimming pools, the place the uncommon earths are then separated and gathered up.
With out cautious consideration to preserving every little thing contained at a mine, stated Meehan, the dangers of contaminating native rivers and groundwater may very well be excessive.
Uncommon earth mines are located near rivers due to the massive volumes of water wanted for pumping the extractive chemical compounds into the hills, he stated.
The contaminated water is then typically pumped again into the river, he added, whereas the groundwater polluted by the leaching can find yourself within the river as effectively.
“There may be undoubtedly scope for that,” stated Meehan.
He and others have tracked the impact such mines have already had in Kachin – the place lots of of mining websites now dot the state’s border with China – from once-teeming streams now barren of fish to rice stalks yielding fewer grains and livestock falling sick and dying after consuming from native creeks.
In a 2024 report, the environmental group World Witness known as the fallout from Kachin’s mining growth “devastating”.
Ben Hardman, Mekong authorized director for the US advocacy group EarthRights Worldwide, stated locals in Kachin have additionally instructed his staff about mineworkers dying in unusually excessive numbers.
The concern now, he provides, is that Shan state and the neighbouring international locations into which Myanmar’s rivers move will endure the identical destiny as has Kachin, particularly if the mine websites proceed to multiply as international demand for uncommon earth minerals grows.
“There’s a protracted historical past of uncommon earth mining inflicting critical environmental harms which are very long-term, and with fairly egregious well being implications for communities,” Hardman stated.
“That was the case in China within the 2010s, and is the case in Kachin now. And it’s the identical state of affairs now evolving in Shan state, and so we are able to anticipate to see the identical harms,” he added.
‘You want to cease it on the supply’
Most, if not all, of the uncommon earths mined in Myanmar are despatched to China to be refined, processed, and both exported or put to make use of in a variety of green-energy and, more and more, army {hardware}.
However, in contrast to China, neither Myanmar, Laos nor Thailand have the delicate processing crops that may rework uncooked ore into worthwhile materials, based on SFA (Oxford), a crucial minerals and metals consulting agency.
The Institute for Technique and Coverage-Myanmar, an area assume tank, says Chinese language customs knowledge additionally present that Myanmar has been China’s principal supply of uncommon earths from overseas since a minimum of 2017, together with a document $1.4bn-worth in 2023.
A signboard on the Thai village of Sop Ruak on the Mekong River the place the borders of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar meet (File: Sukree Sukplang/Reuters)
Myanmar’s exports of uncommon earth minerals had been rising concurrently China was inserting powerful new curbs on mining them at house, after witnessing the environmental injury it was doing to its personal communities. Shopping for the minerals from Myanmar has allowed China to outsource a lot of the issue.
That’s the reason many are blaming not solely the mine operators and the UWSA for the environmental fallout from Myanmar’s mines, however China.
The UWSA couldn’t be reached for remark, and neither China’s Ministry of Overseas Affairs nor its embassy in Myanmar replied to Al Jazeera’s emails searching for a response.
In a June 8 Fb publish, reacting to reviews of Chinese language-run mines in Myanmar allegedly polluting Thai rivers, the Chinese language embassy in Thailand stated all Chinese language firms working overseas needed to observe native legal guidelines and laws.
The embassy additionally stated China was open to cooperating with Mekong River international locations to guard the native surroundings, however gave no particulars on what that may entail.
Thailand has stated it’s working with each China and Myanmar to unravel the issue.
In a bid to sort out the issue, although, the Thai authorities has proposed constructing dams alongside the affected rivers in Chiang Rai province to filter their waters for pollution.
Native politicians and environmentalists query whether or not such dams would work.
Worldwide Rivers’ Pianporn Deetes stated there was no identified precedent of dams working in such a fashion in rivers on the dimensions of the Mekong and its tributaries.
“If it’s (a) restricted space, a small creek or in a faraway standalone mining space, it might work. It’s not going to work with this worldwide river,” she stated.
Naresuan College’s Tanapon stated he was constructing pc fashions to review whether or not a sequence of cascading weirs – small, dam-like boundaries which are constructed throughout a river to manage water move – might assist.
However he, too, stated such efforts would solely mitigate the issue at finest.
Dams and weirs, Tanapon stated, “can simply decelerate or scale back the influence”.
“You want to cease it on the supply,” he added.
