Small-scale gold mining has been going on in the Amazon for decades, with huge expansion of this activity since the early 2000s. It is often done via river dredging, in which miners excavate sediments in search of small pieces of gold. To separate the gold, miners mix liquid mercury into the sediment, which forms a coating around the gold. After burning off the mercury, what’s left is solid gold that makes up 20 percent of all the gold on the world market.
read more... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gold-mining-is-poisoning-amazon-forests-with-mercury/
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