As landfills go, Charles Symons said one cloudless recent afternoon, this has been one of the best. He was gazing fondly at a 40m-high pile of yellow sand. Its south face was under patient assault by a front-end loader; its backside besieged by a man toting a high-pressure fire hose. They and others have been working here, around the clock, since 1997.
By next May, the sand pile, once a veritable mountain stretching hundreds of yards in every direction, will be gone. Symons' company will be a little richer. And, for better or worse, Johannesburg's storied history will be one sand pile poorer.
Symons' company, Crown Gold Recoveries, is, with a handful of others, erasing this city's gold-mine dumps. It is a decades-long job: across the Witwatersrand reef, the long, narrow gold field running east to west just below downtown, there are about 240 of these huge dumps, covering 270km2 of once fertile earth.
Many will be delighted to see them go. Over the decades, the dumps have been both blights and hazards, so laden with heavy metals that few plants can survive on them; so unstable that dry winter winds can bathe the city in toxic dust clouds; so perilous that children periodically vanish in slides and cave-ins.
Yet many Johannesburg residents maintain a perverse attachment to them. Since the first discovery in 1886, the Witwatersrand has produced half the world's gold. Vast reserves are said to remain, but are too deep or inaccessible for miners to extract, and most of the area's mining petered out by the 1970s.
The dumps -- fine-ground quartz sands rising as high as 90m, and "slimes dams" of dried-up quartz slurry -- are so huge that they can easily be seen from space. They are the most visible legacy of a century of mining, which built this city -- the remains of millions of tonnes of ore, hauled from hundreds of meters below the surface by uncounted numbers of laborers.
Some are but a few blocks from Johannesburg's skyscrapered center. One is home to a locally famous drive-in. Others are used by daring youths for dirt-biking, downhill sand-boarding and four-wheel expeditions.
"They're part of our identity -- it's hard to imagine Johannesburg without them," said Flo Bird, the chairwoman of the Parktown and Westcliffe Heritage Trust.
Bird, who calls the mounds "wonderfully stunning," compares them to the Grand Canyon, a ligament-snapping stretch of the imagination if ever one existed. "Of course," she added, "they're wildly polluted. And if you live near them, they're actually dangerous."
That said, it is not pollution, but money, that has drawn companies like Crown to the dumps. As ore was found deeper underground and became more expensive to retrieve, scientists took a second look at the mine tailings and found a mother lode of gold that the unsophisticated technologies of decades past had overlooked.
In the mid-1980s, a few companies began mining the tailings dumps themselves, converting the sand mountains, scoop by scoop, into a watery slurry, which is piped to processing plants on the city's south and east sides for gold extraction.
There, treated with cyanide and mixed with activated carbon and other chemicals, the quartz dust yields a bonanza -- roughly 1.4 ounces of pure gold per tonne of sand, on average, or a little less than US$600 worth at today's rates. In an average month, Symons said, the company produces about US$4.2 million in gold and clears a profit of about US$300,000.
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