The return in 2023 of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to Brazil’s presidency marked a significant setback for illegal gold mining in the Amazon. During Lula’s first year in office, the federal environmental agency, IBAMA, destroyed 600 dredgers used to churn up riverbeds in search of gold, and 150 backhoe loaders doing the same on riverbanks. However, the impact of illegal gold mines reverberates for dozens of years after they close. It’s not just the forests and rivers that may never be the same again; the mercury used by the miners continues to impact future generations. “If we simply stop mining today and let nature regenerate itself naturally, there are estimates that this mercury will remain circulating in the environment for 100 years,” Paulo Basta, who coordinates studies on mercury contamination at Fiocruz, Brazil’s leading federal health research center, told Mongabay. Mercury is widely used in the so-called garimpos, wildcat mines that undergo simpler environmental requirements than large-scale commercial mining projects. It helps separate the gold from the ore by sticking to it and forming a little ball, and is later burned off to leave behind just the gold. The mercury evaporates in the process, but rapidly condenses and returns to nature in liquid form. Mercury contamination also happens earlier in the previous process, when the metal is mixed with the ore, during which some of it washes into the river. “They do this work by hand,” Larissa Rodrigues, a researcher and portfolio manager at the Escolhas Institute, which advocates…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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