This photo taken on May 17, 2019 shows rough rubies displayed at the gems market in Mogok town, north of Mandalay. Burrowing deep underground, thousands of informal miners risk their lives to find gleaming red gems as a law change spurs opportunity in Myanmar's “land of rubies”. (Photo by Ye Aung Thu/AFP Photo)

Men work at Makala gold mine camp near the town of Mongbwalu in Ituri province, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo on April 7, 2018. (Photo by Goran Tomasevic/Reuters)

Miners pulling up lazy tourists to the rim of Kawah Ijen (Ijen Volcano), East Java, Indonesia on September 21, 2017. They will earn as much as they would bring down a load of sulfur. Nomadic Explorer, Cultural Lifestyle Photographer Claudio Sieber captured striking images of miners working at Ijen volcanic range in East Java, Indonesia. The sulphur miners risk their lives daily as they climb the active volcano carrying heavy loads, which they sell to sugar refineries. (Photo by Claudio Sieber/Barcroft Images)

In this Friday, January 7, 2011 photo, people carry baskets of coal scavenged illegally at an open-cast mine in the village of Bokapahari in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand where a community of coal scavengers live and work. The world's biggest coal users – China, the United States and India – have boosted coal mining in 2017, in an abrupt departure from last year's record global decline for the heavily polluting fuel and a setback to efforts to rein in climate change emissions. (Photo by Kevin Frayer/AP Photo)

Christian Balderosdasco, 31, is being pulled up a mud pit after diving for 3 hours to look for gold on March 22, 2017 in Paracale, Philippines. Apart from tunneling and sifting sand, locals dive down murky swamps with the aid of a compressor with air flowing in a small tube for breathing, as they blindly swim under the mud for up to four hours to look for tiny rocks containing gold particles. For decades, local residents at Paracale town work in hazardous conditions scavenging under the earth and diving into tunnels filled with mud using only makeshift tools to mine for gold, often placing their health and lives at risk. (Photo by Jes Aznar/Getty Images)

Ender Moreno looks for gold at La Culebra gold mine in El Callao, Bolivar state, southeastern Venezuela on March 1, 2017. Although life in the mines of eastern Venezuela is hard and dangerous, tens of thousands from all over the country head for the mines daily in overcrowded trucks, pushed by the rise in gold prices and by the severe economic crisis affecting the country, aggravated recently by the drop in oil prices. (Photo by Juan Barreto/AFP 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 “creuseur”, or digger, a plastic lantern on his head, readies to enter a copper and cobalt mine in Kawama, Democratic Republic of Congo on June 8, 2016. Cobalt is used in the batteries for electric cars and mobile phones. Working conditions are dangerous, often with no safety equipment or structural support for the tunnels. The diggers say they are paid on average US$2-3/day. (Photo by Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)