The project is hoping to raise $30,000 to rid the long-abandoned Telemayu mill of over five million tonnes of mine waste – waste which has sullied the waters of the nearby town Atocha for decades. BacTech is an environmental technology company which specializes in such clean ups. Their method is to apply naturally occurring bacteria to remediate mine waste (also known as “tailings”).
BacTech CEO Ross Orr said: “We’re going out there to try and make the lives of indigenous people in Bolivia better, for people that really had no say in the mine development that happened 50 or 60 years ago”.
BacTech turned to crowdfunding in response to Bolivia’s poor market conditions and economic uncertainty, which make traditional forms of finance difficult to obtain. It was the cash-strapped Bolivian government who initially approached BacTech about the scale of their environmental problems in 2012. BacTech intend to clean up Telemayu at no cost to local communities or to the government.
If reached, the $30,000 in funding would go towards assessing the viability of the project through various tests. If results are positive, BacTech would then seek the aid of many ethical, socially responsible, cleantech and impact investment sources to finance a full-scale remediation project.
Want to help? Here’s a link to BacTech’s Catalyst crowdfunding campaign: http://www.csicatalyst.org/projects/38-our-bugs-eat-rocks-a-natural-way-to-clean-up-mine-waste?utm_source=BacTech&utm_medium=BacTech&utm_term=&utm_content=&utm_campaign=BacTech
