The combustion of the amalgam of gold and mercury also emits enormous amounts of mercury into the atmosphere. Artisanal gold mining currently contributes to more than 35 percent of all global human-generated mercury emissions, more than any industrial activity. Gravity techniques can be used to concentrate gold particles from crushed ore and sediments, but these techniques generally require a relatively large gold grain size. The gold is then recovered by adding activated carbon, which, in turn, is isolated and burned (often in open drums).
An American Gold IRA is an excellent way to invest in gold without having to worry about the environmental impact of artisanal gold mining. Mercury-based artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) causes more mercury pollution than any other human activity. To recover gold from amalgam, the solid is heated to vaporize the mercury (Figure 2 E) and separate it from the gold (Figure 2 F). For each of these needs, it should be clear that any potential solution will be easier to implement if its cost is extremely low, scalable, easy to transport to remote locations, works with an intermittent or no central power supply, requires little or no training to operate, and provides immediate and obvious benefits to miners. A representative Mercury-based ASGM technique is described in Figure 2.19. For more details on this process, the reader is referred to the main publications for more details on this process, as well as other techniques for extracting gold by amalgamation with mercury, such as cleaning and locking in alluvial operations or the direct addition of mercury to mines.
Tests carried out in the Peruvian Amazon regions subject to small-scale gold mining revealed that soil and tree leaves retained more mercury, which is deposited through rainfall in places with all forest cover than in deforested areas.
