Miners chop down trees and use high-pressure water hoses to dissolve the soil, he tells us. This technique can turn a primary rainforest into a barren wasteland in just a matter of days.
The miners also use mercury - which binds with gold and forms an amalgam. These miners are not only exposed totoxic mercury - the chemical and its vapours when they burn it off - they're also contaminating the land and inadvertently poisoning food chains. Mercury magnifies, Fernandez says, explaining that the more it travels along the food chain the stronger the contamination becomes. Fish from these waters is ending up on dinner plates hundreds of kilometres downstream.
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