Mercury Removal and Gold Recovery from Artisanal Gold Mining Tailings Using Silver Electroplated Copper Plates

• DOI: 10.22533/at.ed.31731023300310

• Palavras-chave: -

• Keywords: Gold, artisanal mining, mercury.

• Abstract:

  Artisanal gold mining/small-scale gold mining uses elemental mercury to amalgamate gold contained in gravity concentrates. In fact, it is observed that the amount of mercury used is much higher than the actual amount actually needed, which is a real case of misuse of this element. As a consequence of this practice, the tailings that are being generated, bearing high mercury contents, need to be treated to exempt them from this element in order to avoid contamination of the environment, in the first place, and of the operator ahead of this extractive process. Therefore, new ways of removing the mercury contained in these tailings have been applied, among them we can mention the use of amalgamating plates, such as the ones developed at CETEM, which aim at capturing the elemental mercury from mercury-bearing tailings by simply contacting it with metallic copper surfaces coated with an electrolytic silver deposit