'Mercury destroys lives': But if gold mining is here to stay, is there a way to do it safely? | global development

FOr a small rural town in the central Philippines, Paragal, has many pawn shops. Because there is a lot of gold in the ground below. A decade ago, local officials had to tell people to stop digging under their houses to prevent them from collapsing, says Shirley Suzara, vice president of the local mining association.

But the precious metal comes at a cost. “We started noticing these mysterious diseases in our lungs, a kind of poison,” Sujara said, pointing to her chest. “But we couldn't determine where it came from.”

In small gold mines in the Philippines and around the world, mercury is used to extract the precious metal from its ore, poisoning miners and the environment. It is an ecosystem, only after prohibiting toxic substances. He visited Paracale in 2010 and found more mercury in the air than his detector could measure. Diseases lost their mystery.

“We connect the dots,” says Susara of the miners' union in Kasalugan barangay, or town. “It was a horrible experience.”

Susara's cousin, a miner in his 40s, died of lung disease in October 2023, leaving behind his wife and nine children, and was discharged from hospital a year later with a headache.

Although the Philippine government banned the use of mercury in small gold mines in 2012, it remains widespread. But a United Nations project called PlanetGold has chosen Paracale as one of several sites to test a new technique for extracting gold from ore without using mercury.

With approximately 15 million people working in small-scale gold mines, this is a model that PlanetGold wants to replicate around the world.

The Philippines was one of the first eight countries selected to pilot the program in 2019, and last year, Planet Gold began expanding to 15 more countries. He hopes the new processing system can serve as an example for other gold mining regions, from Mongolia to Madre de Dios in the Peruvian Amazon.

In typical processing, mercury is mixed with crushed gold ore, where it adheres to particles of the precious metal, forming shiny balls of mercury-gold alloy. The mixture is heated to separate the metals and leave the gold for refining.

But the process sends mercury vapors into the air and leaches into waterways, where it accumulates in fish and other organisms.

Studies show that even low levels of mercury can attack the central nervous system and cause serious damage: from hair loss, tremors and short-term vision loss, to lung disease, stroke and birth defects after chronic exposure. .

Instead of a chemical process, Planet Gold uses physics to release the heavy gold particles, uses a centrifugal concentrator, and then spins them into a large helical cone.

After months of testing, PlanetGold says the plant can now recover almost the same amount of gold for every ton of ore it receives by treating it with mercury.

The equipment in Baragal and another site in Sagada in the northern Philippines will become the property of local mining unions in 2025, but in other communities across the country, miners will have to raise the money to build it themselves. The equipment is not cheap and is so far only used by practical engineers.

While the Philippine government's Mines and Geosciences Bureau (MGB) and PlanetGold spent more than 32 million Philippine pesos (£429,000) to build the plant in Paragal and train local people to use it, they insist they can recover that sum in three years if the miners do not We will not continue buying mercury.

However, for mining communities where most people earn less than minimum wage, this equipment represents a cost that cannot be covered without outside investment. It's difficult to complain when most mines continue to operate illegally, says Sarah Marie Pante-Aviado, information officer for the provincial government of Camarines Norte, which includes Paracale.

Pante-Aviado grew up next to a mining family and remembers playing with mercury as a child. “It's funny because you can't really grasp it,” he recalls. Now he collaborates with the local government with the mines trying to obtain permits and legalize them.

“This is a very important step to make the mines safe, but the process is very difficult and very long,” he says.

In Paracale, only three areas have received a formal designation to allow small-scale mining, while more than 30 applications are pending, some for almost a decade.

While Pante-Aviado and other advocates work to regulate the unregulated informal sector, other experts want to see a positive outcome for the gold mine. Stephen Lezak, a researcher at Oxford University who studies small-scale gold mining, says: “Mercury is tragic: it destroys lives.

“But even if there were no mercury-assisted gold mines on the planet, the industry would still be hugely disruptive,” he says. Risks include deforestation, water pollution and dangerous working conditions. Like most small processing sites, PlanetGold uses cyanide, but claims to limit the amount of the toxic chemical needed by combining it with an amino acid.

However, in Paracale, where four out of five local residents depend on gold for their income, Pante-Aviado says stopping mining is impractical and attempts to do so will push the sector further underground.

But people should think twice before buying gold, says Lezak. “Communities have depended on coal mining for years, but this is not an adequate reason to extract and burn coal,” he says.

Despite environmental and labor improvements, even in informal mines, miners often work underground for more than 12 hours at a time, distributing food and drinks 80 meters underground using pulleys.

Despite the ban on mercury and a greater understanding of health risks, gold mining is not going anywhere, says Sushara.

“The easiest way to make a living is culture,” he says. “It's what we're used to.”