Decades of artisanal and small-scale gold mining in the Tapajós River Basin have left a heavy environmental legacy in the Brazilian Amazon: rivers contaminated with mercury, and high greenhouse gas emissions. Researchers are now proposing recycling gold as a sustainable alternative, one that could dramatically reduce these impacts and outperform even “green” gold mining, which focuses on more sustainable extraction methods. The findings, presented at a sustainability conference in Japan in November, show that recycling used gold, particularly from high-value end-of-life sources like old jewelry, has the lowest environmental footprint, emitting as little as 22-50 kilograms of CO2 per kilogram of gold produced, according to data the researchers published in the journal Nature Sustainability in 2024. In comparison, artisanal and small-scale mining (ASGM) in the Tapajós River Basin generates approximately 16 metric tons of CO2 equivalent per kilogram of gold, but still less than the 21 metric tons produced by industrial operations. “The carbon footprint is a fundamental problem in gold mining, both ASM and industrial mining,” study co-author Mario Schmidt, a professor of environmental management at Pforzheim University in Germany, told Mongabay. “Here, the only solution is recycling, although care must be taken to ensure that primary gold is not illegally mixed with recycled gold.” Despite the carbon efficiency of recycling “scrap” gold, the relentless demand for newly mined gold persists, driven by economic and fashion pressures as well as cultural notions linking gold and wealth. Even small-scale gold mining releases large carbon emissions, up to 16,000 kilograms of…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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