Mercury pollution and borax substitution in artisanal and small-scale Gold recovery practice Evariste Umba Tsumbu 4IR Yako Consulting Services Pty Ltd, South Africa The Artisanal & Small-scale Mining (ASM) mine mostly due to socio-economic issue. The UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs) seeks to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all ASM by reducing and eventually eliminating mercury use, and by professionalizing and formalizing operations by 2030 with 15-20 million people work in ASM compared with 1 million in large-scale. it is known that the ASM sector produces roughly 20% of global gold. Mercury is highly used in gold’s purification by ASM but unfortunately, it’s highly toxic on human and environment through its chemical transformation into methylate mercury on the ground and enters in seawater to cause pollution. As global temperature increases, the frozen mercury is expected to be released into wildlife & fishing and consequently affects on food chains which may harm the nervous system after contaminated in food intake causing tremors, tunnel vision, psychological problems and eventually death. Unfortunately, there is not yet a cure on mercury poisoning (Clarkson et al. 2003). however, borax has been proven by Peter Appel et al as non-hazardous chemical reducing gold melting point & facilitating its separation and currently used as detergent across the globe with more than 50% of gold’s recovery compared with mercury in artisanal mining in Philippines. the implimentation of a mini-gold refinery process for unwrought gold with semi-advanced machines with borax followed by water & soil recycling in home-garden will empower the asm through mercury usage reduction, training, double or triple the asm income, reduce property in mining community, increase mining permit accessibility and boost the sector through gold’s value increase, and better the environment. this small-scale model will be similar with rand refinery which was established by some large-scale mining like Sibanye, Drdgold and others References 1. Appel, W.U.; Jonsson, J.B.; GEUS. 2010, 20, 87-90 2. Olga, S.; Rauno, S.; Kathryn M. j.resourpol. 2020, 68, 0301-4207
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