Abstract
We highlight the inefficiency of whole ore amalgamation practices used by artisanal gold miners. Cyanide is an alternative to mercury, but cleaner (cyanidation) plants are expensive and demand certain skills to operate. The main costs associated with operating a standard cyanidation plant using gold precipitation with zinc are linked to filtration, which can be costly for artisanal producers to deploy. To overcome the cost barrier, we call for the adoption of a Modified Merrill-Crowe Process (MMCP), which simplifies gold precipitation from cyanide solutions because it eliminates the need for filtration and vacuum system. Under this setup, zinc shavings in a fabric bag are introduced into the pulp of the leaching tanks with very low agitation. Lab results from a Colombian ore sample revealed that 84% of the gold was leached in 24 h with 1 g/L of CN, and over 99% of gold was precipitated in two hours. By comparison, lab amalgamation tests on the same ore using 28 times more mercury used by artisanal miners yielded less than 19% gold recovery.
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