(Maybe this post is out of place but thought you guys would find it as interesting as I did.) National Geographic had a neat show on about gold. There were basically 3 parts/locations to the show. One of them featured an illegal gold mining, boom town that sprang up somewhere in Peru. It's illegal because they were clearing protected rain forest so they could mine the ground. Basically, the procedure was as follows: - Pan in a pool of water nearby to determine the amount of gold flake concentration in that area. If the area looked promising, proceed to next step. -Clear all vegetation and burn it to get it out of the way. - Set up conveyors beneath a hill. Set up equipment (old truck engine that provided power for a high pressure hose) - Start blasting the hill away with water, letting the debris flow down the belts onto burlap mats that the heavier gold settles in to. Do this for 24 hrs or more, destroying the landscape. - Collect the mats and wash the packed mud and debris into a blue tarp with water pooled over it. - Somehow, they extract the final clumps of mud they want and dump them into a 55 gallon drum with water. (And just when you thought they couldn't damage the environment anymore! ) - Pull out bottle of liquid Mercury. By hand, disperse 200 grams of liquid mercury into the 55 gallon drum. Mix in with water. - Take off shoes and socks. Climb into 55 gallon drum and start smashing the water/mercury mixture through the mud at the bottom. (The gold instantly bonds with mercury when it comes into contact with it.) - Dump the water through a screen, letting the waste water flow back into the mess you've made, a.k.a, the environment. A screen and pan catches the clumps of mercury. - Pour this into a coffee cup. Then pour into a new pan. - Now you have a glob of mercury in a pan. Then, they take a torch and heat it. The mercury burns off into the air as a gas leaving behind a thin, palm sized chunk of gold. - Break off pieces from it and weigh them to pay your workers. - Drive back into town on a motorcycle with whatever is left. (Try to avoid getting robbed when you get there.) - Sell the ounce that's left for less than 800 dollars to local smelter. (Note: As far as quantity mined, this was an excellent, as much as can be expected, excavation. Some yield much less.) - Go back and start over another day. There was a whole town of people doing this. It said they keep pushing further and further into the rain forest leaving behind a muddy wasteland surrounding the town that looks like the surface of Mars. Between them and the cocaine farmers, there won't be much rain forest left in a hundred years. What a dirty way to get it. I'm not a big global activist but this activity was pretty disturbing to me. Just sad.
I don't see what's surprising about this as if this is something that happens only in Peru. This happens globally in countries such as Indonesia, Myanmar, India, China, etc, where they cannot afford expensive solvent extraction and mercury / cyanide is still very cheap. These men usually have no idea what kind of health impact mercury has on their bodies, much less how much damage it does to the environment which in turn harms them. By the time they realize the toll, it's usually too late. If I am not mistaken, there were lobbies (sorry can't remember it off my head) that wanted to intervene the sales of mercury and have them traced to whom they are going to. Possibly impractical.
