MANILA: A mercury-free gold mining process being practiced by small-scale miners in Benguet for several years is getting the attention of their foreign counterparts.
The process does not require rocket science and does not involve the use of a substitute to mercury or expensive equipment, but merely the tweaking of the ore grinding process during which rocks are crushed to get to the gold within.
Leoncio Na-oy, a member of the Emerald Small-Scale Miners Multi-purpose Cooperative under the Benguet Federation of Small-Scale Miners Associations, Inc, said their system has been proven to be “more profitable” so it has been widely used by many small-scale miners in the mineral-rich Northern Luzon province.
“We have seen that it results in better gold recovery,” Na-oy said in a phone interview. “We recover better gold grades from the process.”
Na-oy explained that their system only introduces innovations in the early stage of the mining process when rocks are crushed to search for gold ore.
He said Benguet small-scale miners are practicing mercury-free mining by adding a sluice box in a stage after the rocks are crushed right before they go into a chute during the process.
The system also requires a controlled flow of water during the crushing and washing process to find the gold ore among the crushed rocks or sand.
Na-oy said that in the olden days, gold miners in Benguet did not use mercury in the rock crushing stage. Mercury was introduced into the process only in the 1970s by large-scale miners.
In the late 1980s, he said, mercury-free mining was already being practiced by some miners who did not want to use the toxic chemical.
The system was refined and improved with the help of Danish scientist Peter WU Appel.
Appel and Na-oy came up with a paper “How to Mitigate Mercury Pollution in Tanzania” after they introduced the mercury-free mining system to Tanzanian small-scale miners in 2010.
Their paper was recently published in the Journal of Environment Protection.
Na-oy and fellow small-scale gold miner Rudy Onos are leaving today for Indonesia to teach their Indonesian counterparts the environment-friendly gold mining process.
Na-oy is also set to go to Bolivia in September as he has been invited by mining groups there that are interested in the mercury-free gold mining process.
His next trips are to Peru and Ghana also upon miners’ invitation.
Na-oy is a History graduate of the University of Baguio in 1987. He ventured into small-scale gold mining when he failed to get a job after graduation.
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