Fair Trade gold addresses serious environmental and health issues that impact the small-scale miners and their communities.
The photo above shows the process common with millions of small scale gold miners around the world, mixing mercury and gold with unprotected hands.
My brother who is a high school science teacher tells me that if a mercury thermometer were to break in his class, a HAZMAT team would be called in.
It gets even worse.
He will take the remnants of his gold and mercury and burn it off in his kitchen frying pan in order to separate the mercury from the gold. This creates methyl mercury, one of the most dangerous neurotoxins known.
No comments:
Post a Comment