Throughout the past four decades, most projects related to mercury in Artisanal Gold Mining (AGM) have been dedicated to monitoring the environmental and health impacts of the activity without actually proposing effective solutions to tackle the issue. Recently, the UN and a few NGOs have been dedicated to bringing solutions to artisanal gold miners, but the outcomes remain modest, given the funds expended and the considerable effort invested by interventionists. This commentary paper critiques some of the interventions observed in the last four decades and suggests some technical strategies to approach artisanal miners to reduce mercury losses. It is stressed that mercury elimination is a consequence of good engagement with miners that creates opportunities to show them how to produce more gold with cleaner methods. We recommend that academics educate a new generation of engineers working with AGM to adopt a more practical approach, ensuring they understand the needs, motivations, and skills of artisanal miners before proposing solutions.

Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining (ASGM) is a primary source of global mercury pollution, creating an urgent need for sustainable, low-cost alternatives to amalgamation. This study investigates the use of cassava wastewater (manipueira), a cyanogenic agricultural byproduct, as a lixiviant for a gold concentrate (14.30–15.87 ppm Au) from an artisanal mine. Two approaches were evaluated: direct leaching with manipueira in natura (250 ppm CN⁻) in single and double 8 h and 12 h cycles, and leaching with a cyanide solution concentrated from dilute manipueira (100 ppm CN⁻) via a simplified air-stripping system. Results were benchmarked against the mine’s amalgamation (44.7% recovery) and 30-day heap leach (75.8% recovery) processes. The most effective method observed was a two-cycle, 8 h leach with manipueira in natura, which achieved a mean gold recovery of $76.75\pm 4.71\%$. This result is comparable to the efficiency of the site’s lengthy heap leach process and suggests a promising, faster, route to eliminating mercury use. Longer (12 h) leaching cycles yielded lower recoveries, suggesting process limitations such as preg-robbing. The cyanide concentration method proved inefficient, recovering a maximum of 12.40% of the available cyanide and resulting in a weaker lixiviant. The findings demonstrate that while direct leaching is a viable alternative to mercury, the inherent instability of manipueira necessitates a focus on developing efficient, controlled systems to extract and concentrate its cyanide content, thereby creating a standardized “green” reagent from a large-volume agricultural waste stream.

Despite decades of intervention efforts, mercury amalgamation remains widespread in artisanal gold mining (AGM), yet no prior study has presented an integrated metallurgical balance quantifying gold (Au), silver (Ag), and mercury (Hg) simultaneously across both the amalgamation and cyanidation stages of a single processing circuit. This study addresses this gap by evaluating an artisanal amalgamation–cyanidation operation in Pernambuco, Brazil, through systematic sampling, fire assay and ICP-OES analyses, grain size distribution, and SEM-EDS mineralogical characterization. The whole-ore amalgamation (WOA) stage recovered 44.7% ± 11.7% of Au and 11.5% ± 15.4% of Ag from a feed grading 2.96 ± 1.53 ppm Au and 8.09 ± 1.65 ppm Ag. Subsequent vat cyanidation of the Hg-contaminated tailings recovered 75.8% ± 4.32% of the remaining Au and 32.9% ± 9.24% of Ag, raising overall recoveries to 86.6% ± 2.89% for Au and 40.6% ± 4.58% for Ag. Although both stages contribute meaningfully to gold recovery, under the operating conditions evaluated, cyanidation contributed more substantially to overall Au recovery than whole-ore amalgamation. SEM-EDS identified free amalgamated electrum particles in the tailings, attributed to excessive pulp density (≈43% solids) impairing particle settling on the amalgamation plates. These inefficiencies led to estimated mercury losses of 262 g/day, yielding a Hg_(lost):Au+Ag_(produced) ratio of 5.5. Based on this diagnostic evidence, replacing whole-ore amalgamation with optimized comminution followed by gravity concentration is identified as a technically promising mercury-free pathway requiring pilot-scale validation.