Addendum on technical and economic assessment of mercury-containing tailings (2009)
 

The Mercury Waste Management project is amended by a technical/chemical and economic assessment of mercury-containing and mercury-contaminated tailings from the mining sector in developing countries. A feasibility study will be undertaken in at least two developing countries that produced/produce precious metals or mercury and are left with mercury-containing tailings.

In the mining sector, mercury has two roles:

1. Mercury is extracted from cinnabar as a sellable product, and

2. mercury is used in the extraction of precious metals such as gold, silver, copper and others.

Both processes that largely occur in developing countries at either large scale or small scale leave tailings around the excavation and production sites that contain these heavy metals. Since the residual concentrations of the heavy metals remain relatively high, typically these sites are declared “contaminated sites” posing a risk to the environment and the general population. With this project it is attempted to undertake a feasibility study in exemplary developing countries that produced/produce precious metals or mercury with these technologies to undertake a cost-benefit analysis for the environmentally sound remediation options based on the concentration of the residual precious metals and the mercury.