In the northern Colombian department of Choco, gold buyer Alfredo Hurtado walks across a bulldounced stretch of jungle the size of a football field. It’s a former gold mining site, and it’s littered with slag heaps and pits of contaminated water.
The miners who worked here just desired the gold, Hurtado says. “They don’t care once the land is turned upside down.”
Hurtado says this sort of wasteland is really a popular sight in Colombia. With gold require booming around the world, shows is booming in Latin American. Colombia ranks among the world’s top-15 producers, and about half of its bullion is extracted through small-scale miners and illegal prospectors who usually leave behind a ravaged and badly polluted landscape.
One of the biggest problems is mercury. Many miners use the toxic stainless to separate the gold from the ore through which it’s found. nevertheless exposure to mercury can guide concerned and permanent health problems, as well as brain damage and birth defects. And Colombians are exposed to large amounts of it. A late UN report found that Colombia is that the world’s largest mercury polluter per capita from mining.
A woman pans for gold at a Green Gold mining site in Choco department in northern Colombia. (Photo: John Otis)
A woman pans for gold at a Green Gold mining website in Choco department in northern Colombia. (Photo: John Otis)
nevertheless these days the commonwealth is in addition ground zero for a fresh campaign to clean up small-scale mining. It’s called Oro Verde, or Green Gold.
One project is on display right here in Choco.
Alongside a small mountain river, Miner Luis Palomino picks a few leaves from a balsa tree and stirs them in a wood bowl filled with water and sediment from the river. The leaves create a soapy movie that attaches for the lighter minerals and might be washed out, leaving behind heavier flecks of gold. They do basically the same thing as mercury, but without the health risk.
The technique was passed down through Palomino’s ancestors, former African slaves. Palomino says it’s slower and extracts less gold, but he has no interest in using mercury. “We’ve mined gold like this often all our lives,” he says.
And belead the technique is chemical-free, Palomino earns a 15 percent premium over the world price for gold via a UK-based outfit called Fairtrade and Fairmined.
Green Gold project director Felipe Arango says Fairtrade and Fairmined gold costs more, however he believes there’s a market for it.
“Our bet is that if we can attach a value to it of course , if we can acquire consumers to recognize it, it must be enough,” Arango says. “The forests as well as the ecosystems that are around these mines ought to be more valuable than the gold itself.”
The idea behind these and other efforts is to do for gold mining what the organic and reasonable trade movements are creating for foodstuff production.
“This is a sector that will transform itself,” says Lina Villa, who heads the Alliance for Responsible Mining in Medellín, Colombia. Her organization promotes techniques that cut back on mercury use, nevertheless don’t eliminate it altoreceiveher. Things like better storage and handling techniques can reduce accidents and toxic emissions, and miners who adopt them are eligible for a 10 percent bonus from Fairtrade and Fairmined.
“Miners are willing to change and to do things in a various way,” Villa says. “So once you have that information that change is likely, not embracing change doesn’t receive ready sense.”
Instead of using mercury to separate gold from ore, Green Gold miners use a soapy liquid produced with water and leaves from balsa trees. (Photo: John Otis)
Instead of using mercury to separate gold from ore, Green Gold miners use a soapy liquid built with water and leaves from balsa trees. (Photo: John Otis)
Fairtrade and Fairmined hopes to sign up legions of miners across Latin America, Africa and Asia. Small-scale prospectors like these make up 90 percent in the world’s gold mining labor force.
however so-called responsible mining has been slow to catch on. Mining with less mercury takes longer and is less profitable, even with the premiums. That is why just 1,400 miners in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia have so far joined the Fairtrade and Fairmined movement.
Supporters aren’t discouraged, though. Green Gold’s Felipe Arango points out that campaigns for realistic-trade coffee and chocolate furthermore commenced slowly and are today booming.
“This is that the foundation,” Arango says. “Right now the volumes are small, but we are starting to observe consumers plus the mining market paying attention to a several way of creating things.”
And for the miners in Choco, those numerous ways of generating things bring more compared to health advantages.
As she takes a break from shoveling, Green Gold miner Mariveth Mosquera points to patches of land that have been restored after excavation, and which now sprout crops like yucca and plantains. The premiums she and her family receive for their eco-friendlier approach have furthermore helped them build fish ponds with mercury-free water to cultivate Tilapia.
“Yes, mining like this is harder,” Mosquera says. “nevertheless mercury could kill the fish. It might affect everything. Working without mercury is better.”
Aritcle source http://www.theworld.org
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