It took nearly two hours from Bo City to Lablama, a gold mining hamlet on the outskirts of Sierra Leone’s Southern Province.
Approximately 200 meters off the Kangari Hills Forest Reserve gangs of artisanal gold miners clusters around pits frantically searching for gold as if it were the California Gold Rush of the 1800s.
One of the miners stoops within a tarpaulin pool full of dirty water and ore. He washed the slurry using a headpan half full of ore and water. Mercury, a sliver-like liquid floats in his metal bowl, attracting and merging with the gold to produce an amalgam.
The miner then carefully turns the mercury which is now mixed with gold into a handkerchief-size cloth and squeezes the blend, the mercury escapes leaving a nugget of gold-laced with some amount of mercury inside the cloth.
Without any protective gear or safety measures, these miners engaged in the crude and dangerous process of using mercury to extract gold.
The use of mercury in artisanal gold mining is spreading across the sector, says Peter Rosenbluth the Project Manager of Enabling and Growing Responsible Artisanal Gold Enterprises.
7 communities have been identified using mercury in gold mining, he reveals.
However, the situation is even scarier because there is “no geo database of mercury-contaminated sites in the country.”
According to Peter mercury is hazardous to the environment and it highly toxic, “even trace amounts of exposure can cause severe irreversible damages to the brain, kidneys, lungs and the nervous system.”
On 1st November 2016, Sierra Leone ratified the Minamata Convention on Mercury- an international treaty designed to protect human health and the environment from anthropogenic emissions and releases of mercury and mercury compounds.
Four years later, in 2020 the Environment Protection Agency-Sierra Leone (EPA-SL) developed Sierra Leone’s National Action Plan (NAP) for reducing mercury use in the Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining (ASGM) in the country.
By then, mercury use was limited to three sites in Sierra Leone’s ASGM sector. This includes two artisanal gold mining (AGM) sites where mercury was used for processing mine tailings, and for liberating gold from hard rock ore. The third site concerns a foreign-owned small-scale mining company operating a dredge on a river.
According to EPA-SL’s NAP the total average estimate of mercury use in Sierra Leone’s ASGM sector per year is 352kg.
However, this amount might have substantially increased since seven sites are now been discovered using mercury to process mine tailings.
“In the areas where mercury use was observed, most miners did not know where mercury was coming from because only a few people were involved in the mercury trade. This had to do with the fact that mercury was very expensive,” states EPA-SL’s NAP.
One of the miners in Lablama said he does not know where the mercury is coming from. He said it is very expensive; a cap of a water bottle, which is equivalent to 1 oz ($0.37-0.64/g) costs Le100,000.
Due to a lack of finance and a lack of technology, these miners rely largely on mercury, which is significantly less expensive than any other substance utilized in small-scale gold mining.
