Pasco

Pasco hosts one of the world's starkest examples of a city consumed by its own resource extraction—Cerro de Pasco, at 4,330 meters elevation among the highest cities globally, has been hollowed out by a 300-meter-deep open pit mine that now dominates this 70,000-person settlement. Mining here dates back nearly 400 years to Spanish colonization, and the legacy of lead, zinc, and silver extraction has made this one of the world's most polluted places. In February 2022, the United Nations designated Cerro de Pasco one of four "sacrifice zones" in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The contamination is systemic: heavy metal levels exceed WHO safe limits by hundreds of times in water, dust, and sediment. Lake Junín, a wildlife preserve south of the city, shows extremely high copper, zinc, and lead concentrations. At least 2,000 children in the Pasco region live with chronic heavy metal poisoning. Volcan, owned by Glencore since 2017, has accumulated 57 violations of environmental regulations; the Norwegian Pension Fund divested over $1 billion from Glencore in 2020 citing systematic human rights violations.

Yet circular economy experiments suggest possible remediation. In August 2024, Peru granted Cerro de Pasco Resources the first permit to mine tailings as an exploration project—the Quiulacocha Tailings Storage Facility contains an estimated 430 million ounces of silver equivalent. Reprocessing historical waste could extract value while reducing contamination. Whether this represents genuine remediation or simply another extraction phase remains to be seen, but the city that mining created may finally find value in cleaning up what mining destroyed.