Canadian mining engineer Adrian Daniel, who just made an in-depth study of small mining operations in Guyana, South America as part of a Canadian project to find safer alternatives to the use of mercury to extract gold from ore, revealed that only 27,700 kilos of gold were extracted by small-scale miners and small ball mill gold processors during the last ten years from 2000 to 2010 in Davao's gold mining areas.
"This is only half or less than what they could extract from the gold ore if they use better methods like gravity concentration, flotation and cyanide which are used by large gold miners," Daniel told delegates during the recent Conference on Arsenal and Small Scale Miners in Mindanao at the Ateneo de Davao University.
Daniel said that the other half or more of the gold had been dumped as wastes by small scale processors who crushed the ore with big hammers into small particles and separate the gold particles with mercury -- a practice prevalent among ball milling operators in Compostela and Pantukan mining areas.
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