In this May 4, 2014 photo, a miner holds an amalgam of mercury and gold he mined after working a 28-hour shift at an illegal gold mining process, in La Pampa, in Peru's Madre de Dios region. Thousands of artisanal gold miners sweat through the long shifts and endure, for a few grams of gold, the perils of collapsing earth, limb-crushing machinery and the toxic mercury used to bind gold flecks. (Photo by Rodrigo Abd/AP Photo)

Miners work extremely long days under the hot sun and the hours are often longer in illegal mines in Ghana, West Africa, 2014. An Australian photographer has captured the harsh reality of illegal mining under the unforgiving sun with these Ghanaian miners. (Photo by Heidi Woodman/Barcroft Images)

A man shaves blocks of salt from the Danakil Depression on 28 March 2017, in Afar, Ethiopia. Every morning, hundreds of men converge on a dry lakebed in a remote corner of Ethiopia, where they cleave the ground open with handaxes to extract salt, just as their fathers and grandfathers once did. (Photo by Zacharias Abubeker/AFP Photo)

A rag-and-bone woman stands next to carriages of a coal train outside a coal mine of the state-owned Longmay Group on the outskirts of Jixi, in Heilongjiang province, China, October 22, 2015. (Photo by Jason Lee/Reuters)

An employee walks near a rotary dredge which works on the coal face of the Borodinsky opencast colliery, near the Siberian town of Borodino, east of Krasnoyarsk, December 9, 2014. The Borodinsky colliery, 9 km (5.6 miles) long and more than 100 meters (328 feet) deep, annually produces more than 20 million tons of coal and is considered to be the biggest opencast coal mine in Russia, according to official representatives. (Photo by Ilya Naymushin/Reuters)

A miner sits front of the statue of St. Barbara, saint of the miners, during last working day at Hungary's last hard coal deep-cast mine at Markushegy December 23, 2014.The underground mine, west of the capital city Budapest, has to stop producing coal at the end of this year in line with a European Union effort to shut down uncompetitive hard coal mines. (Photo by Laszlo Balogh/Reuters)

An aerial view shows the 11/19 pit and twin slag heaps at the former coal mine site in Loos-en-Gohelle, northern France, November 1, 2015. Loos-en-Gohelle, a town of 7000 inhabitants in the North of France, marked by the closure of coal mines in 1970, has demonstrated a successful transition from coal to a green economy. (Photo by Pascal Rossignol/Reuters)

7 year old Soni has a basket of coal lifted onto her head by her mother, 28 year old Savita, after having scavenged coal illegally from an open-cast coal mine in the village of Bokapahari on February 08, 2012 near to Jharia, India. (Photo by Daniel Berehulak /Getty Images)