Roughly 14 million to 19 million people work as artisanal and small-scale gold miners (ASGM) in developing countries, according to a 2017 study. Many of them use mercury, a permanent, potent neurotoxin, in order to be marginally efficient in capturing gold. These people mine to live, and in the process, they inadvertently release more than 8,000 pounds of mercury into our environment every day, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates. They are poisoning themselves and the rest of us as mercury vapors and micro-particles are transported globally on winds and ocean currents.
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