Social Goals
$2 per day. This disadvantaged economic position often results in debilitating quality of life issues such as a lack of access to education and adequate health care.
Artisanal and small scale mining provides a means of income for tens of millions of people worldwide. Although potentially more than a few dollars a day, this income is often barely enough to meet essential needs, let alone enough to work towards increases in economic position and quality of life. In the face of this, these miners are typically losing significant quantities of gold due to inefficient or ineffective mineral processing techniques because of a lack of education as well as a lack of access to safe, affordable and effective technology.
The i-Concentrator aims to knock down these barriers by providing state of the art, safe, easy to understand and easy to operate mineral processing technology at a small fraction of the price needed to obtain similar gold concentration performance at an industrial level. The i-Concentrator has the potential to increase gold production as well as gold recovery in order to have a positive compounding effect on the economic position of artisanal and small scale miners around the world.
Environmental Goals Mercury is an important part of gold extraction for many of the estimated 20 million artisanal and small scale gold miners worldwide. A recent UN study suggested that the amount of mercury emitted to the environment by artisanal and small scale mining activities in likely between 800-1,000 tonnes per year. Unfortunately, the use of chemicals like mercury and cyanide in artisanal and small scale mining often leads to their release into the surrounding environment and collection in the very plants and animals which local communities rely on for survival. One of the main goals of the i-Concentrator is to reduce the use of these harmful, toxic chemicals by artisanal and small scale miners. Since these chemicals are added to the mined material on a per weight basis for gold extraction, the i-Concentrator is able to greatly reduce their use by producing a low weight, high grade gold concentrate without using any chemicals whatsoever. The developers of the i-Concentrator hope to not only reduce the global environmental cost of artisanal and small scale gold mining, but also improve the health of the local communities through a reduction in the use of harmful chemicals. |
In many developing countries it is common for people to be living on less than a dollar or two per day; in 2002 the United Nations Population Fund estimated that there were over 3 billion people (half the entire world’s population) worldwide living on less than