By Lucy-Claire Saunders

 

 

 

When a fluorescent light bulb burns out, that’s when it starts.

Eco-friendly institutions, like the University of British Columbia, pay an Abbotsford company to extract the mercury and ship it to another company in Pennsylvania. There, the mercury is cleaned and recycled, sold and shipped around the world.

But by cleaning up our own backyard, those who participate in mercury recycling programs indirectly take part in a global trade that effectively supplies some of the dirtiest gold mining in the developing world.

 

It’s only now becoming clear how mercury ends up in the hands — quite literally — of small-time gold miners, says Kevin Telmer, a geochemist at the University of Victoria. 

This week, Telmer is presenting five years worth of field research to the United Nations Environmental Mercury Partnership Program in Rome. Since 2002, Telmer and Marcello Veiga — the chief technical advisor for the UN’s Industrial Development Organization and a professor in the Norman B. Keevil Institute of Mining and Engineering at UBC —  have been collecting data on how toxic mercury is used in small scale gold mining operations.

Mercury is a toxic heavy metal, and there have been campaigns in dozens of countries to ban mercury altogether. Exposure to the silvery, liquid metal can cause potentially fatal poisoning, or mercurialism, severely damaging the central nervous system.

Telmer and Veiga have gathered alarming evidence of close-contact mercury use by adults, and even by young children, who are set to task stirring vats of mercury with their bare arms.

Dubbed the Global Mercury Project (GMP), the UN initiative recently wrapped up its first phase after having successfully reduced the use and release of mercury in several parts of the world, including Indonesia. 

The second phase of the GMP, which will focus on 30 more countries, is set to begin in the next month, thanks largely to Telmer and Veiga’s work.

Although mercury is freely traded around the world, it is never officially purchased to mine gold.

And yet 30 per cent of the world mercury is used for gold mining. Indonesia, for example, does not allow mercury to be used in gold mining and yet large amounts are imported for that exact purpose.

While the global  mercury trade is estimated to be worth $25 million, only a few are profiting, says Telmer.

And as the price of gold continues to soar, the demand for mercury will follow.

“This is the biggest gold rush we’ve ever seen,” says Veiga. “So for developing countries, mining gold makes a lot of sense.”

Between 20 and 30 per cent of global gold production is carried out by artisanal miners, who use an organic mercury compound called methylmercury — an extremely poisonous substance. These activities produce significant medical, environmental and social problems for miners and nearby families. Artisanal mining is defined as small, medium, informal, legal and/or illegal mining where miners use rudimentary processes to extract minerals.

Veiga and Telmer reckon that total mercury consumption for Indonesia is equal to 100 to 140 tonnes a year. The estimate is rough, but by using aerial and satellite photography, and studying several mining operations across the country, the two are confident in their estimate.

Mercury is used at various stages in mining for gold because of its chemical properties which allow it to easily bind to gold. Typically, mercury is added to the slurry, which is passed over a mercury coated copper plate.

The mercury-gold amalgams are then burned to recover the gold while releasing the mercury as vapour, which travels into the environment and straight into the lungs of workers, causing neurological and kidney problems.

In the Galangan mine in central Kalimantan, Indonesia, miners pump gold ore into a sluice box where the concentrate is amalgamated in pools close to the miners’ homes. With their bare hands, they handle the amalgam and burn it without any protection in their kitchens in order to recover the gold.

The GMP crew found high levels of metallic mercury in the miners' lungs in every pilot country. In North Sulawesi, Indonesia, miners tested had 1,697 µg mercury per gram. The normal level should be anywhere between .5 and 5  µg mercury per gram.

Veiga says miners are not aware of the health and environmental risks that mercury poses.

 

This is clearly evident, as miners handle the mercury by hand, squeezing excess mercury into a bucket.  Children sit with their legs crossed, daydreaming as they mix gold and mercury together by hand. It’s a cheap alternative to expensive equipment like centrifuges.

Mercury is generally used because it’s easy to use, it’s accessible and it’s cheap. One gram of mercury costs 17 cents whereas one gram of gold will fetch roughly $28. 

The amount of mercury waste is staggering. Veiga and Telmer estimate that small scale mining releases 640 to 1350 tonnes of mercury per year into the environment from at least 70 countries. The non-biodegradable metal finds its way into nearby river sediments and local vegetation, which is eaten by food animals. 

In Talawaan, Indonesia, 156 fish tested for mercury by Veiga and his team had an average level of .58 parts per million (ppm). Health Canada regulates mercury levels for most commercial fish at .5 ppm.

Wildlife habitat is also destroyed as miners denude large swaths of forest to build mines. In Galangan, Indonesia, 200 km of forest were leveled after nearly 10,000 illegal miners swarmed the area, says Veiga. As a result, the orangutan species has severely suffered, losing roughly 80 per cent of its range.

Indonesia had the fastest pace of deforestation in the world between 2000-2005, according to Greenpeace, with an area of forest equivalent to 300 soccer pitches destroyed every hour.
Back here, on the other side of the world, several Metro Vancouver institutions boast of their eco-friendly mandates and insist that by recycling fluorescent lights, for example, the amount of potential mercury released into the local environment is reduced.

In 2007, UBC recycled 21,527 units of fluorescent lighting containing just more than 215 grams of mercury. In spite of the low quantity of mercury that UBC is "cleaning" the importance is that the intention is not right, says Veiga. Canada alone exported 18 tonnes of mercury in 2007 to U.S. and this mercury is coming from various sources including fluorescent lamps.

Unfortunately, cleaning up the backyard can mean contaminating the rest of the world, says Veiga.

UBC pays Nu-Life $16,000 to collect the lamps and break them apart so they can be shipped to Bethlehem Apparatus in Pennsylvania, according to Veiga.

Rand Heiberg, a plant informant at Nu-Life, says that his company in the only one in B.C.

that deals with mercury phosphorus powder,  which is used for industrial purposes such as thermometers, switches, batteries and fillings in dentistry. 

“It’s ecologically more sustainable to recycle mercury than to simply throw it away,” he says.

Once the mercury has been separated from the fluorescent lamps, it is shipped to Bethlehem Apparatus — the largest commercial recycler of mercury in North America. In 2006, the U.S. exported 320 tonnes of mercury world wide, largely through this company.

John Boyle, the administrative and environmental director at Bethlehem Apparatus says making sure the recycled mercury makes its way into credible and legal hands is a top priority.
“There is no regulatory permit requirement (to buy mercury) but we sell to companies that have, what we consider, essential-use manufacturing purposes,” he says.  “There are concerns about artisanal mines in third world areas that are essentially using it unsafely . . .  but we don’t want the liability of selling to those kinds of customers.

“It’s a very small market, more of a retail market. So it’s not something we’re essentially involved in, at least not directly.”

The global mercury trade is proving a difficult industry to clamp down on as global demand is estimated to run at 3,400 tonnes per year, according to the UN. 

But as the price of gold continues to increase and the dangers of poorly equipped artisanal mines becomes more prevalent, calls are being made for stricter regulations.

The port in Rotterdam, Netherlands — one of the largest in the world — is a main hub for mercury trading, says Telmer. But that could change if the EU council listens to recommendations made by the EU’s environment committee, which recently proposed a ban on all exports of mercury by Dec 1, 2010.

Veiga and Telmer hope that until large exporters curb their product’s availability, the GMP will help miners  implement safer ways of panning for gold.

UBC mining grad students, for instance, have recently devised cheap but safe ways of mixing mercury and gold, including the use of a small, portable centrifuge that can be jimmied to a bicycle or rudimentary gold concentrators.

But gold miners will not stop using mercury simply because it is bad for their health or the environment, says Veiga.

As the price of gold continues to soar, the only way to change the miners’ habits is to prove that the GMP suggestions will increase profits. Until then, artisanal miners across Asia will continue to use mercury to support their livelihoods.