How to Mitigate Mercury Pollution in Tanzania
- 1 Department of Petrology and Ore Geology, Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, Copenhagen, Denmark
- 2 Benguet Federation of Small-Scale Miners, Baguio, Philippines
Abstract
Mercury pollution from small-scale gold mining poses a serious threat to the global and local environment. Recycling of mercury for small-scale miners has been introduced over decades in Tanzania with little success. The environmentally benign borax gold extraction method invented more than thirty years ago in the Philippines and presently used by more than thirty thousand Philippine miners has proved to work on the gold ores in Chunya and Singida gold districts of Tanzania. By using borax instead of mercury the miners reduce the risk of polluting the environment and spoil their health for generations. The most convincing argument for the miners to change to borax is that they can increase their gold recovery up to fifty percent without need for investing in new equipment and without much more work on processing.
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- P. W. U. Appel and L. Na-Oy, “The Borax Method of Gold Extraction for Small-Scale Miners,” Journal of Health and Pollution, Vol. 2, No. 3, 2011, pp. 5-10.
- E. M. Thaysen, P. W. U. Appel, H. Skov, G. Asmund and M. E. Goodsite, “Mercury in Ambient Air, Soil and Maize from Small-Scale Mining Communities in Tanzania,” Poster at SEGH Meeting in Galway, Conference Schedule and Abstracts, 2010, p. 135.
- Educational Video Demonstrating the Borax Gold Extraction Process. http://youtu.be/X6Sawj0HyF0