By Husna Tunje

11/2/2023

After the morning plenary, from, I had the opportunity to attend a Knowledge Lab at the Minamata Convention from 2:00pm to 2:45pm. This lab was based off of a presentation from Mr. Gabriel Ibarra and Alfonso Rodriguez on Tailings Management. The two speakers were from Pure Earth, a company established in 1999 and is specialized in identification and management of toxic sites in lower and middle-income countries. They have been working in Colombia since 2016 and have made more than 50 environmental interventions and clean-ups there. The company works on tailings because they believe that this is the main contributor to the spread of mercury. Poor management of ASGM tailings contributes to high mercury concentrations in mining sites. In Colombia, Pure Earth works on 86 contaminated sites with tailings that have concentrations of mercury from 50-120ppm. The speakers emphasized though, that the amount of gold recovered from the contaminated sites was high as well. (5-15g/ton)Pure Earth presents an innovation based on a sustainable model for the recovery of mercury from tailings of Artisanal and small-scale gold Mining (ASGM). The company has adapted and improved upon a modular technology based on silver-coated copper plates to recover mercury from tailings and prevent its release to the environment during ASGM practices. During the recovery process, mercury from tailings is retained by the plates, ensuring that Hg is not reintroduced into the environment. The silver plating on the plates forms an amalgam with the elemental mercury present in the tailings, and the mercury can be disposed of or reprocessed as appropriate. The miners can also safely reprocess tailings for residual gold capture.It was interesting to learn that Pure Earth is considering working with the Colombian government to introduce incentives for this process in order to motivate miners to use the copper plates innovation for cleaning up sites. It was also noted that most of the tailings are presented from illegal mining and pure earth seeks to clean-up these tailings rather than encourage mining using mercury as in the case of ASGM. The Knowledge Lab was concluded with questions from the audience and an assertion that the innovation was simple, versatile, and provides a return on investment to miners when they get gold from the reprocessing process.

The afternoon plenary session began at 4:30pm after a series of contact groups discussing matters pertaining to the amendment proposals such as thresholds for mercury-waste. The session however, was slow because parties spent a long time cleaning up text, line-by-line, so that it was agreeable to all parties. It was interesting to see how differently parties negotiate. The idea of ‘ants’ and ‘gorillas’ that I had learned in HNR 360 prior to coming to the Convention became even clearer during COP-5.