How to Mitigate Mercury Pollution in Tanzania

Copyright © 2013 Peter W. U. Appel, Leoncio Na-Oy. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attri-bution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Mercury pollution from small-scale gold mining poses a serious threat to the global and local environment. Recycling of mercury for small-scale miners has been introduced over decades in Tanzania with little success. The environmen-tally benign borax gold extraction method invented more than thirty years ago in the Philippines and presently used by more than thirty thousand Philippine miners has proved to work on the gold ores in Chunya and Singida gold districts of Tanzania. By using borax instead of mercury the miners reduce the risk of polluting the environment and spoil their health for generations. The most convincing argument for the miners to change to borax is that they can increase their gold recovery up to fifty percent without need for investing in new equipment and without much more work on proc-essing