Chinese government report published in June reveals the scale of mining waste Tibet will generate over the next five years, including in the headwaters of rivers that flow into India. The disclosure is particularly significant as India presses Beijing to resume sharing Brahmaputra hydrological data.
On August 7, at border talks in New Delhi, India pressed China to resume sharing Brahmaputra water-flow data and to convene an early meeting of the Expert Level Mechanism on trans-border rivers, stressing the importance of sharing details of upstream river projects. China has not transmitted hydrological data on the river since June 2023, the government told Parliament last year.
Major focus is being placed on the $167-billion Medog mega-dam, whose construction began in July 2025 about 50 kilometres from the Arunachal Pradesh border. But six weeks before the latest border talks, Beijing published a detailed account of its mining strategy and the waste it expects the sector to generate in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR).
This report focuses on mining waste within the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), which covers only part of traditional Tibet’s three regions, including U-Tsang, Kham and Amdo. The findings therefore do not represent all of Tibet, but show what Chinese official documents reveal about mining waste and environmental risks within the TAR and their implications beyond its borders.
Tibet’s Mining Waste, in Beijing’s Own Figures
On 30 June, the Tibet Autonomous Region’s Department of Natural Resources published the environmental impact report for its Mineral Resources Master Plan (2026-2030), assessing the environmental consequences of another five years of mineral extraction. The plan implements the mineral strategy embedded in the TAR’s 15th Five-Year Plan, adopted in February.
Forty-six licensed metal mines, including 16 copper, 24 lead-zinc and five chromite mines, will generate 338.70 million tonnes of solid waste and 82.57 million cubic metres of industrial wastewater annually by 2030. Almost all of it comes from copper mining, which accounts for 98.9 per cent of the solid waste and 89 per cent of the wastewater, with its tailings holding an estimated 33,500 tonnes of arsenic annually. Arsenic is a Group 1 carcinogen, and the WHO’s provisional drinking-water guideline is 10 micrograms per litre.
The figures are rising. Wastewater, chemical oxygen demand and solid waste are all projected to increase by 16 to 18 per cent over the 2025 baseline, driven by a copper output target lifted from 550,000 to 650,000 tonnes.
How Mining Waste Is Being Stored
A separate government disclosure shows how mining waste is handled in Shannan, a prefecture that holds the Zhaxikang lead-zinc mine and the Luobusa chromite operations, both in the Yarlung Tsangpo basin. The Shannan municipal environment bureau’s 2024 report records 3.90 million tonnes of industrial solid waste, 99.9 per cent of it mine tailings
The bureau records disposal as zero. Just under half — 48.06 per cent — of mining waste was backfilled into mined-out voids, and the remainder went into waste dumps and tailings ponds. At Zhaxikang alone, 537,690 tonnes of flotation tailings were produced in 2024, and 96 per cent of that waste went into storage. The disclosure puts the accumulated total in Shannan’s tailings facilities and waste dumps at 17.41 million tonnes.
The environmental impact report projects no cumulative figure of its own. At the assessment’s projected rates, the 2026-2030 plan period would add well over a billion tonnes of solid waste and upwards of 150,000 tonnes of arsenic into storage. Much of the mining footprint lies in the Yarlung Tsangpo basin, which becomes the Siang at the Arunachal Pradesh border and the Brahmaputra in Assam.
Mining Concentrates in the Yarlung Tsangpo Basin
Nearly half the region’s mining-right occurrences — 48.6 per cent — are situated in the Yarlung Tsangpo basin, which contains Tibet’s densest mining footprint.
The report mentions five copper mines situated inside water-environment key pollution control units. Four are in the Yarlung Tsangpo system, including Julong, Gyama and Zhibula, clustered on the upper Lhasa River in Meldro Gungkar county, and Xiongcun on the mainstem in Xietongmen.
The report says wastewater from the upper Lhasa River cluster enters small tributaries where dry-season dilution capacity is weak, allowing localised high-concentration zones to form. The assessment recommends a dry-season discharge cut of not less than 50 per cent, a three-tier monitoring network, and the inclusion of surrounding farming and pastoral water intakes in the water-quality protection scope. It puts the load at roughly 799 kilograms of arsenic and 597 kilograms of lead entering the Lhasa River each year. The measures indicate that Chinese authorities themselves regard the discharge as an environmental-management risk requiring tighter controls.
The Impact on Local Tibetan Communities
The contamination falls first on Tibetan communities living beside the mines. Sampling published in 2010 found heavy-metal contamination in the stream draining the Gyama valley into the Lhasa River, at levels its authors judged to pose a high risk to people and livestock. In 2014, more than a thousand villagers from Dokar and Zibuk protested that the same mine was poisoning the water they drank and used for irrigation. Officials called it natural.
Seventy-seven extraction planning blocks cover 2,043.82 square kilometres, including 255.82 square kilometres of grassland. Peer-reviewed research finds complete recovery of degraded alpine pasture infeasible and also highlights that soil formation and regrowth at that altitude are too slow.
In Tibet, opposition to mining can quickly become a security matter. In November 2025, around 80 Tibetans were detained in Kashi village, Sershul, after protesting against a gold-mining operation on their traditional pastureland. The authorities subsequently imposed a communications blackout, making independent verification of events difficult.
The Risk of Mining Waste Contaminating Rivers
Tailings are a wet slurry of ground rock, processed water and residual metals stored behind embankments, and are subject to seepage through and beneath the facility during ordinary operation.
The report identifies heavy-metal seepage from copper tailings ponds as a risk requiring project-level assessment and names tailings-pond seepage control as a water-environment priority. But it does not quantify how much arsenic or other heavy metals could reach the river through seepage. Its long-term assessment of copper solid-waste accumulation is qualitative, with the actual risk depending on the durability of anti-seepage engineering over what it describes as a decades-long process.
The plan also addresses catastrophic failure. Tailings ponds are barred within 500 metres of active fault zones; large and medium-sized facilities must prepare dam-break emergency plans; and interception dams are mandated downstream of major copper tailings ponds. The Tibetan Plateau is highly seismically active. A magnitude 6.8 earthquake near Tingri in January 2025 killed 126 people and damaged four reservoirs.
Who Is Operating the Mines?
Chinese mining companies have a documented record of mismanaging mining waste, releasing it into rivers and disputing responsibility afterwards. Zijin Mining acquired 50.1 per cent of Tibet Julong Copper in 2020, taking control of Julong and Zhibula — two of the three mines Beijing names. Zijin is now the world’s third-largest miner by market value.
Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global excluded Zijin in 2013 over environmental risks, citing repeated tailings-dam failures. In 2010, acidic copper wastewater from Zijin’s Zijinshan operation entered Fujian’s Ting River through an unauthorised observation well. About 1,890 tonnes of farmed fish died, drinking water for 60,000 people was fouled, and five executives were criminally convicted.
Why India Cannot Check
The Siang has run dark three times — in 2017, 2020 and 2022. In the first instance, Arunachal Pradesh’s State Water Quality Testing Laboratory recorded turbidity of 482 NTU against a potable limit of 5 and declared the water unfit to drink. “Chinese hands” were suspected, with Chinese construction and other upstream activity cited as possible causes, but the source of the turbidity was never confirmed.
India monitors flow on the Siang at Tuting and Pasighat, but has no long-term water-quality or sediment-chemistry baseline against which upstream changes could be detected and attributed. The published study covering the Indian and Bangladeshi stretch sampled sediment rather than dissolved metals and predates the current expansion. The river’s data-sharing arrangement with China has covered rainfall and flow during the flood season, not water quality.
Sediment-source studies show Tibetan material makes up under a fifth of Bengal delta sediment, with the eastern Himalayan gorge contributing far more. But sediment volume does not answer the contamination question. The upper Siang, between the border and the gorge’s main inputs, would carry any upstream discharge at relatively low dilution, precisely the conditions under which Beijing identifies weak dilution capacity.
Implications for India
China tightly restricts independent access to Tibet, and the assessment was written by a wholly state-owned geological company holding equity in two Tibetan mining companies. That makes independent verification difficult. But the significance of the report lies precisely in what even this self-interested assessment acknowledges about mining waste and environmental risk.
For India, there are two major implications. Mining waste accumulating in the TAR creates a risk of chronic contamination through seepage and a separate risk of sudden, potentially catastrophic release if a tailings dam fails. Seepage could carry heavy metals into tributaries of the Yarlung Tsangpo over years. A dam failure could release a concentrated pulse of stored waste and contaminated water downstream. The immediate concern is not proven contamination in India. It is the combination of an expanding waste burden in the TAR, its concentration in the Yarlung Tsangpo basin, and India’s limited ability to detect and attribute any future contamination.
China’s official documents establish that mining waste is accumulating upstream. Now the question is whether India’s monitoring, baseline data and diplomatic mechanisms are sufficient to detect and attribute future contamination. India asked this week for flow data and details of upstream projects. Water quality was not among them.
The stakes extend far beyond India. As China’s own official report notes, six major transboundary rivers — the Yarlung Tsangpo, Ganges, Indus, Mekong, Salween and Yangtze — rise on the Tibetan Plateau and supply approximately 2.5 billion people across China and downstream countries in South and Southeast Asia. Tibet, encompassing the three traditional regions of U-Tsang, Kham and Amdo, is a major strategic mineral base for China, and its mining sector is projected to expand further. What happens to Tibet’s rivers and ecosystems, therefore, cannot be treated as merely a domestic Chinese environmental issue, as it is a question of Asia’s wider water security and ecological future.
By Tenzin Younten, Senior Researcher, 108 Peace Institute — Originally published in Firstpost, August 13, 2026: Article Link