Artisanal & Small-Scale Gold Mining (ASM)

Around 100 million people worldwide live off artisanal and small-scale gold mining.¹ It produces an estimated 15 % of the gold that comes out of mines each year, yet it accounts for 90 to 95 % of every job in global gold mining.² This article is the overview: how the sector grew, how the work actually gets done, what damage it causes, and what potential it holds.

Key Insights

• Artisanal and small-scale gold mining is the biggest employer in gold mining. 15–20 million people work in it directly and around 100 million live off it – and it accounts for just 15 % of global output.
• Per kilogram of gold, small-scale mining employs around a hundred times as many people as industrial large-scale mining. If you are looking for social impact, this is where to find it. Nothing else in the gold sector comes close.
• What causes the damage is the method, not the size of the operation. Best and worst practice are worlds apart: several times the mercury, roughly three times the diesel – for an identical end product.
• The sector is the world's largest man-made source of mercury. It accounts for around 37 % of all mercury released into air, water, and soil. How much gets used depends entirely on the method.
• Most small-scale miners are not making a choice. They are taking the only option they have. No alternatives, little schooling, and formalization they cannot reach are what hold the situation in place – not indifference.

What small-scale gold mining is – and is not

Small-scale mining is mining with a lot of manual labor and very little capital. The technical term is artisanal and small-scale mining, or ASM; for gold specifically, artisanal and small-scale gold mining, or ASGM. It covers individuals, families, cooperatives, and small enterprises that recover gold with simple equipment – in tunnels, in riverbeds, in open pits.

The authoritative definition comes from the OECD. Its Due Diligence Guidance for mineral supply chains describes ASM as "formal or informal mining operations with predominantly simplified forms of exploration, extraction, processing and transportation. ASM is normally low capital intensive and uses high labour-intensive technology."³ The definition stretches across the whole range: individuals digging alone or with their families, and cooperatives with hundreds or thousands of members.

Its counterpart is large-scale gold mining: highly mechanized, capital-intensive, usually run by international corporations, and with very few workers per unit of gold produced. Both forms often exist in the same country, sometimes on the same mountain.

One distinction matters more than any other, and the public debate blurs it constantly: small-scale mining is not the same as illegal mining. The sector falls into three groups:

• Formalized: The operation holds a concession, a license, and legal status. It pays duties and is subject to state oversight. This is the smallest group.
• Informal: The mining is not prohibited, but it is unregistered – usually because formalization is too expensive, too slow, or practically out of reach. This is the largest group.
• Illegal: The mining takes place in protected areas, on someone else's land, or under the control of criminal networks.

Lump these three together and you inevitably arrive at the wrong solutions. Much of what headlines call "illegal gold mining" is, in legal terms, informal mining by people who would much rather be working legally.

How artisanal mining grew since 2000

The single biggest driver of that growth is the gold price. In 2001, a troy ounce of gold averaged 271 US dollars.⁴ On September 9, 2026, it stood at 4,418 US dollars.⁵ The price has risen more than sixteenfold in 25 years – and for people with no land title, no savings, and no employment contract, gold is now the most accessible income their region offers.

No clean global time series exists for artisanal gold mining on its own. The all-commodity figure for small-scale mining gives an indication: in 1999, the International Labour Organization estimated around 13 million people working in the sector; the World Bank today puts it at around 45 million across 80 countries.⁶ That is more than triple – across all commodities, not gold alone.

For gold itself there are two fixed points to compare. A widely cited study estimated global small-scale production at 380–450 tonnes for the reference year 2011.⁷ A 2023 meta-analysis arrives at a median of 520 tonnes, within a range of 380–870 tonnes.⁸

Price is not the only force at work. The others: no rural income alternatives, migration into mining areas, currency collapse, and political crises.

By the numbers: little gold, many people

15–20 million people work directly in artisanal and small-scale gold mining worldwide. The United Nations puts the figure at 10–15 million, including 4–5 million women and children; more recent estimates from the Intergovernmental Forum on Mining suggest close to 20 million across roughly 70 countries.⁹ Add upstream and downstream activity plus family members, and around 100 million people live off the sector.¹

Annual output runs to roughly 500–600 tonnes of gold.¹⁰ For comparison: in 2025, mines worldwide produced around 3,672 tonnes, more than ever before.¹¹ Small-scale mining therefore accounts for around 15 %; some sources put it as high as 20 %.²

Put those two numbers side by side and you get the sector's defining metric. In small-scale mining, roughly 25 to 40 people work directly on every kilogram of gold. In industrial large-scale mining, it is about 0.3. Per kilogram of gold, small-scale mining employs around a hundred times as many people.¹²

Put differently: an artisanal miner produces roughly one troy ounce of gold per year, about 31 grams. In large-scale mining, the figure is around 100 ounces per employee. On that arithmetic, a wedding band containing 5 grams of fine gold from small-scale mining is about eight weeks of one miner's work.

All of these figures are estimates, and the ranges are wide. Between 10 and 20 million workers is a factor of two; for output, the scientific range runs from 380 to 870 tonnes. That is not sloppiness – it is what informality does to data. People who are not registered appear in no statistic. The uncertainty is itself a finding: it shows how far into the shadows this work sits.

How gold is mined in the artisanal sector

"Small-scale mining" is not one method but an entire spectrum. Between the woman panning in a river and the cooperative running a ball mill, shaking table, and cyanide plant there are whole technological worlds. And that gap is where the damage is either made or avoided.

Where the gold sits

The deposit type determines everything that follows. Small-scale mining works three kinds of occurrence:¹³

• Alluvial deposits, or placers: Gold particles carried down and deposited by rivers from weathered rock – in riverbeds, terraces, and floodplains, often only a few meters deep.
• Weathered rock zones, or saprolites: Gold in soft, partly decomposed rock. Easy to break loose, but unevenly distributed.
• Primary hard rock: Gold in mineralized veins, at 10–50 grams per tonne of rock and in exceptional cases up to 200 grams. It has to be blasted, crushed, and ground.

For comparison: industrial open pits process ore averaging around one gram per tonne.¹⁴ Working by hand, small-scale miners can only make rich veins pay – which is why they move a fraction of the material per kilogram of gold: roughly 50 to 100 tonnes, against a hundred to well over a thousand.¹⁵

Placer gold is usually coarse and can be recovered purely mechanically. Hard-rock gold is finely intergrown and has to be crushed and ground first – and that is where the chemicals come in.

How the gold comes out of the ground

Four mining methods dominate, and their impacts differ sharply:

• Hand panning: A pan or batea, often as a sideline and frequently done by women. The smallest intervention, and the smallest yield.
• Alluvial open-pit mining: Stripping the overburden and washing the gold-bearing gravel over sluices, often with high-pressure water. Destroys soil and vegetation over large areas.
• River and floating dredges: Suction or bucket dredges churn up riverbeds, cloud the water, and shift sediment over long distances.
• Underground mining: Shafts and tunnels following the veins, usually without engineering, ventilation, or adequate support. By far the most dangerous option for the miners – but the gentlest on the environment, on farmland, and on neighboring communities, because almost nothing at the surface is touched.

Often all of it happens at once: in many regions, hand panners, cooperatives working tunnels, and mechanized dredging operations share the same river valley.

From rock to gold: processing and chemistry

How finely the ore is ground determines both recovery and chemical demand. Crushing and grinding is done by hand, with jaw crushers, or with ball, hammer, stamp, and Chilean mills. A common mistake: many operations grind only to around 2 millimeters instead of below 0.5 millimeters, leaving a large share of the gold locked inside the rock.¹³

Concentration comes next, and it is purely mechanical: sluices, shaking tables, spirals, or centrifuges. Good shaking tables deliver concentrates above 50 % gold content.¹³ Concentrate properly and you need far less mercury, or none at all – that is the single most important lever in the entire sector.

Mercury is still the most widely used separation agent. It binds gold particles into an amalgam, which is then heated until the mercury evaporates. The worst practice is whole-ore amalgamation: mercury at a ratio of 4:1 up to 20:1 and beyond relative to the gold recovered, at recovery rates that rarely exceed 30 %.¹³ Amalgamate only the concentrate and the ratio drops to roughly 1:1 to 1.3:1. Retorts and fume hoods capture the vapor and cut emissions by 75–95 %.¹³

Cyanide leaching achieves the highest recovery – often 90 % of the gold contained in the ore.¹³ Plenty of people assume it is the greater danger. Set against mercury, it is the lesser evil: cyanide does not accumulate in the body or the food chain, and it degrades in the environment, chiefly through volatilization, oxidation, photolysis, and microbial breakdown.¹⁶ The danger it poses is acute, which makes it obvious to everyone working with it. Mercury poisons slowly, odorlessly, invisibly.

That high recovery is more than an economic argument. Pull out as much gold as possible on the first pass and less of it is left behind in the residues. Otherwise those tailings get reworked years later – with cyanide. When cyanide then meets mercury-bearing material, soluble mercury-cyanide compounds form, which travel more easily in water and make the mercury more biologically available.¹³ Used properly and from the start, cyanide is a way out of mercury.

It also works without mercury altogether. In direct smelting, a high-grade concentrate is melted with fluxes such as borax until the gold separates from the remaining minerals. An example from Mongolia shows a complete mercury-free chain – jaw crusher, Chilean mill, sluices, shaking table, direct smelting – at around 70 % recovery.¹³ It suits only small, high-grade concentrates, though, and scales poorly. So getting out of mercury means paying for one of two things: proper concentration plus direct smelting, or a cyanide plant run safely. Both cost money that nobody in the informal sector has.

Where ASM gold mining takes place

Artisanal gold mining happens in 70 to 80 countries, almost exclusively in the Global South.⁹ Three macro-regions shape the picture.

Asia has the most small-scale miners in absolute terms, concentrated in China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Myanmar, and Mongolia. For 2014, around 10.6 million people were counted in small-scale mining across all commodities, 9 million of them in China alone.² Mongolia is also a showcase for well-developed mercury-free methods.¹³

Sub-Saharan Africa follows with around 9.9 million small-scale miners (2014, all commodities), but it is the region that leans on the sector hardest: in African countries, 5–20 % of the population depended directly on small-scale mining, against 0.1–5 % in Latin America and 0.1–1 % in Asia.² The focal points are Ghana, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Sudan, Tanzania, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Latin America, with around 1.4 million small-scale miners (2014, all commodities), is the smallest of the three regions² – and the best documented, because mining there is pushing into the Amazon rainforest and the Andes. The focal points are Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Venezuela, and the Guianas. The patterns vary widely: in Ecuador, 85 % of national gold production comes from small-scale mining; in Bolivia, 99 % of the gold comes from mining cooperatives.¹⁷

The problems of small-scale gold mining

Mercury: the world's largest man-made source

Artisanal gold mining releases more mercury than any other human activity. It accounts for around 37 % of the roughly 2,200 tonnes that enter air, water, and soil each year.¹⁸ Practically all the mercury used in the sector ends up in the environment.

The chain of effects reaches far beyond the mine. Mercury enters rivers, where microorganisms convert it into methylmercury. It accumulates in fish and reaches people who have never seen the inside of a mine. It attacks the nervous system first, and unborn children and infants hardest.

How much gets used depends entirely on the method: whole-ore amalgamation averages around 5 kilograms of mercury per kilogram of gold, amalgamation of concentrate 1 to 2 kilograms.¹⁹ Field measurements in the Brazilian Amazon show that with retorts, of 1.7 kilograms used only around 0.19 kilograms reach the environment.²⁰ Bad practice and good practice are separated by several times the mercury – and that gap is exactly what binding standards target. More on the environmental consequences of gold mining as a whole: gold's environmental impact.

Cyanide: manageable, but rarely managed

Set against mercury, cyanide is the lesser evil – but only when it is under control. In most artisanal operations, it is not. A practical guide from planetGOLD and the Artisanal Gold Council records that "CN use in the ASGM sector often occurs in the absence of critical safeguards and responsible management practices," and that "poor monitoring and management of effluent by CN operators in the ASGM sector is widespread."²¹ Leaching happens in unlined ponds and heaps, detoxification is rare, and whatever is left seeps away or runs off. Unlike in large-scale mining, a spectacular dam failure is rarely the threat here. The risk is quieter: leaking ponds, heavy rain, direct discharge.

For rivers and for the people living beside them, the consequences are immediate. Aquatic life is far more sensitive to cyanide than life on land, and as the compounds break down, "toxic metals can be mobilized into the environment and aquatic ecosystems."²¹ A field study in the Philippines shows how close all of this sits to people's homes: leaching ponds stood "as short as 5 m" from houses, residues ran untreated through drainage canals into the nearest river, and 35 % of the miners examined had elevated cyanide levels in their blood.²² The problem is not the substance. It is how the substance gets handled – and that is fixable, with equipment and oversight.

Deforestation: gold is the largest driver

Between 2001 and 2023, mining directly destroyed 19,765 square kilometers of forest worldwide – and gold, at just under 42 %, is the single largest driver, ahead of coal at 26 %.²³ That comes to roughly 8,200 square kilometers, an area about the size of Puerto Rico. The greenhouse gases released add up to 0.75 billion tonnes of CO2 over the period, around 0.39 billion of it from gold mining alone.

Two thirds of that deforestation traces back to mining that appears in no official register. For gold, the share is 73 %.²³ The problem, in other words, is not where people are looking. It is where they are not.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the Amazon. The mining footprint there more than doubled between 2018 and 2024, to well over 2 million hectares, more than half of it in Brazil.²⁴ By mid-2025, the damage in Peru added up to 139,169 hectares, 97.5 % of it in the Madre de Dios region – an area larger than all five boroughs of New York City combined.²⁵

With alluvial mining the mechanism is always the same: clear the vegetation, strip the overburden, wash out the gold-bearing material. What remains is sand, rubble, and mercury-laden pools – a landscape that will not reforest on its own, because the topsoil is gone.

Carbon footprint: diesel off the grid

Energy demand in artisanal gold mining is met almost entirely by diesel generators. Mining areas are rarely on the grid; pumps, excavators, mills, and lighting all run off generators. The most thorough field study to date – 47 sites in the Brazilian Amazon – puts the figure at around 16 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per kilogram of gold, within a range of 10 to 30 tonnes.²⁰

Here too, the method is what matters. In the same study, underground hard-rock mining comes in at around 9.8 tonnes per kilogram, excavator-based alluvial mining at 18, river dredges at 25.7, and manual alluvial mining at 29.2 tonnes.²⁰ The reason is the same as with mercury: where little gold sits in a lot of material, more has to be moved, pumped, and washed – and diesel consumption rises with it. Large-scale mining averages 23 to 33 tonnes per kilogram of gold worldwide.²⁶ One caveat belongs with these figures: the evidence base for artisanal mining is thin. A single regional field study carries most of the weight here, while the large-scale figure rests on 194 mines in 35 countries.

The miners' health and safety

Artisanal mining lacks almost everything that makes work safe. Tunnels are driven without engineering and entered without adequate support; collapses and burials are among the most common causes of death. Blasting is often done by people with no training.

Then there is the slow damage. Silica dust causes silicosis, an incurable lung disease. Noise, vibration, and heavy lifting wreck hearing and joints. Protective equipment is rare; medical care in remote mining areas is rarer still.

Outside the tunnel it is no better. Many mining areas lack clean drinking water, sanitation, and electricity. Boomtowns appear within months, with no planning at all, and with predictable consequences for sanitation, crime, and the safety of women. Fall ill or get hurt and you earn nothing. There is no safety net.

Who works there – and why

Child labor is widespread in artisanal gold mining. According to the International Labour Organization, more than a million children work in mines and quarries worldwide. In Burkina Faso and Niger, 30–50 % of the gold mining workforce are children; in Mali, around 20 % of small-scale miners are minors.²⁷ More on this: gold's social impact.

Women make up a substantial share of the workforce, above all in crushing, washing, and amalgamation – the very tasks with the highest mercury exposure. In ownership, concessions, and decision-making they are far less present.

What matters most is why these people are there at all. Small-scale mining, as the Intergovernmental Forum on Mining puts it, "is generally pursued as a route out of poverty or as an activity to complement insufficient income, especially in communities where alternative employment is hard to come by."² In most mining regions there is no factory, no office, and no second source of income.

Schooling ends early, few people know what mercury actually does, and if you earn nothing today you do not eat tomorrow. None of this excuses child labor or environmental destruction. But it shifts the question of responsibility: most small-scale miners are not choosing between good and bad. They are taking the only option their region offers.

A precious metal at a miserable price

People who mine gold informally rarely sell it on good terms. Without a concession there is no bank loan, and without a loan there is no equipment. Traders step in: they pre-finance tools, fuel, and mercury – and secure a share of the output in return, before the miners earn anything at all.

The size of that share has been studied. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a third of production typically goes toward repaying the pre-financing.²⁸ In Ghana, the OECD describes a common model with 30 % for the concession holder and 40 % for the sponsor – only the remainder is split among the diggers.²⁹

Distance is what sets the price per gram. The more remote the point of sale, the larger the trader's margin. In Burkina Faso, miners at the mine site receive 85–87 % of the LBMA fix for small quantities, while exporters in the same country get 97 %.³⁰

A miner who has been pre-financed cannot wait and cannot shop around; the gold goes back to whoever advanced the credit. What grows out of that is a cycle of advances and debt that can run across generations. The gold price may be at record levels; for the people pulling that gold out of the ground, only a fraction of it arrives.

Where armed groups control the mining

In some regions, gold has long been a revenue stream for armed groups. This is documented most thoroughly for the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. There, 85 % of the small-scale miners recorded work in gold – making gold by far the region's most important artisanal commodity.³¹

Of roughly 132,320 miners recorded, 61 % were affected by "interference," meaning illegal levies imposed by armed actors. Non-state armed groups were present at 29 % of the mine sites visited, units of the Congolese army at 37 %.³¹ These shares cover all commodities; since 85 % of the miners work in gold, they apply overwhelmingly to gold mining.

For the miners this is the worst of all possible arrangements: no rights, no way out, and a buyer who collects levies by force.

Where the gold disappears to

A substantial share of artisanal gold leaves its country of origin without ever being declared. In 2022 alone, at least 435 tonnes were smuggled out of Africa, more than a tonne a day. The annual value of that trade runs to 24–35 billion US dollars. Between 2012 and 2022, smuggling more than doubled. The main destinations are the United Arab Emirates, Switzerland, and India.³²

The route is well documented. Between 2012 and 2022, the Emirates imported around 2,596 tonnes of undeclared African gold. Over the same period, Switzerland imported more than 1,670 tonnes from Dubai.³² What makes this possible is a rule under Swiss law defining the last place of processing as the origin: gold from the Emirates counts as Emirati gold, regardless of where it actually came out of the ground.

At the end of the chain, freshly mined gold can turn into "recycled gold." According to an analysis by IUCN NL, a single transformation after initial refining is enough in practice for gold to be declared recycled – even when it comes from illegal sources and was mined only weeks earlier.³³ Several investigations indicate that illegally mined gold enters the formal supply chain this way. We unpack what the term actually covers in what is recycled gold?

Why so little changes in ASM

Formalization is the obvious way out – and out of reach for most. Concession procedures take years, cost fees, and require expert reports, legal advice, and often cooperation with distant authorities. People fighting for today's income cannot pre-finance that path. Informal status is rarely a decision. It is usually an outcome.

Blanket bans regularly make things worse. Ecuador is the textbook case: mercury is prohibited by law there, yet small-scale mining continues to use it covertly.¹⁷ The ban did not end the use – it pushed it into illegality, where nobody trains, measures, or inspects anything. A trade grew up to match: the Environmental Investigation Agency documented that over four years, at least 200 tonnes of illegal mercury were smuggled from Mexico into Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia, organized by criminal cartels.³⁴

Standards for small-scale mining draw their own conclusions from this. The Fairmined Gold Standard deliberately refrains from an immediate mercury ban and regulates its use instead, on the grounds that an abrupt prohibition would mean "95% of all artisanal miners would be excluded from the development opportunity of Fairmined."³⁵ People who are excluded do not stop digging. They just keep digging without rules.

When the industry looks away

The same logic applies on the buyer side – and there it bites hardest. In its own study, the London Bullion Market Association describes "a trend among GDL refiners to 'de-risk', by declining to refine ASM gold."³⁶ The reason is not a lack of interest. It is effort: due diligence on artisanal gold is more complex and more expensive than on gold from large mines.

The consequence can be quantified. Of the 5,038 tonnes that Good Delivery refiners processed in 2020/21, just 21 tonnes were recorded as artisanal gold – around 3 % of the then-estimated 700 tonnes of global artisanal production.³⁶ More than 95 % of that gold moves outside the audited channels.

Some refiners have announced their exit openly: in 2019, a Swiss company shut down its entire artisanal mining business, citing "the on-going complexity in the supply chain."³⁷ A study on integrating artisanal gold notes that among refiners, "many still have a policy to not receive ASM gold."³⁰

The LBMA spells out where that gold goes instead: "most ASM gold will enter international markets via the paths of least resistance" – through traders, aggregators, intermediate processors, and refiners that impose no meaningful due diligence.³⁶ Exclusion does not remove the gold. It removes the visibility.

The consequences of exclusions like these have been studied. Following US conflict minerals regulation, the Democratic Republic of the Congo saw what a PLOS ONE analysis calls "a de facto ban on artisanal mining that deprived hundreds of thousands of artisanal mining communities from their livelihoods" – accompanied by measurably more violence in the affected areas.³⁸ Up to two million miners were shut out by formalization and regulatory requirements.³⁹

Artisanal mining is not the cause of these problems. It is the symptom. The causes are the missing alternatives, the legality nobody can reach, and a supply chain that rewards opacity and penalizes anyone who looks closely. Buy gold without asking where it came from and you keep that system running. Ask, and you start to change it.

The potential: why this sector moves so much

The labor intensity that makes small-scale mining so vulnerable is also its greatest strength. Per kilogram of gold, roughly a hundred times as many jobs hang on it as in large-scale mining. Every improvement in conditions reaches vastly more people.

The value created stays in the region. Wages, purchases, and services circulate locally instead of flowing out as corporate profit. In many mining regions, small-scale mining is the largest employer and the main source of cash moving through the local economy.

Small-scale mining combines well with other work. In the Andes it is common for families to move seasonally between mining and farming. Combinations like these make regions more resilient, because income does not hang on a single price.

The technology for cleaner methods already exists. Finer grinding, sluices, shaking tables, retorts, direct smelting with borax, and controlled cyanide plants are proven and work in small-scale settings. What is missing is capital, training, and oversight – not the method.

The sector has also started measuring its own impact. The Alliance for Responsible Mining was the first organization to build a tool that translates the GHG Protocol's carbon accounting methodology to small-scale mining conditions, and uses it to measure emissions of individual mining organizations across all three scopes.⁴⁰ That matters, because for a long time the sector went unmeasured: the World Gold Council explicitly excluded it from its own climate study for lack of solid data. That gap is now being closed – and the measurements lead to concrete action: solar power, more efficient engines, reforestation.

Formalization works where it is achievable. Legal status brings access to credit, predictable offtake, measurable working conditions, and the ability to invest in equipment instead of just surviving the next day. Traceable gold also fetches markedly better prices than material whose origin nobody can document.³⁹

The buyer is what makes or breaks this. A small-scale operation can only finance safety, environmental protection, and social standards if someone at the other end of the chain is willing to pay for them – reliably, over years. Questions about origin and conditions are not moral decoration. They are the signal that settles, on the ground, whether change pays for itself.

Where income becomes predictable, more changes than income. Children go to school instead of standing at the washing trough. Health care becomes affordable. Women move into positions with decision-making power. That is not a side effect of mining. It is what sustainable development means at its core.

What you should take away

• Artisanal and small-scale gold mining is small in output and enormous in people. Around 15 % of the world's gold, 90 to 95 % of employment in gold mining, around 100 million people living off it – and per kilogram of gold, roughly a hundred times as many jobs as in large-scale mining.
• What causes the damage is the method, not the size of the operation. Whole-ore amalgamation and open burning do many times the damage of clean concentration with a retort, direct smelting, or controlled cyanidation – for the same end product.
• The problems are real and severe, and the miners are not their cause. Mercury on a scale that makes the sector the largest man-made source worldwide, gold as the single largest driver of mining-related deforestation, child labor, silicosis, debt bondage. People work under these conditions because there is no alternative, no legality within reach, and no buyer asking where the gold came from.
• Done right, this is one of the most effective instruments for sustainable development the resource sector has. Nowhere else does a single kilogram of gold reach so many people. Which is exactly why this is where it gets settled: whether gold does damage, or carries development.

Every purchase is a vote for one system or the other. If you want your gold to carry documented origin and measurable impact, see what we have in stock – or ask us what would fit your production.

Further reading

• The industrial counterpart, and how it differs in almost every respect: large-scale gold mining.
• The two forms side by side, with the trade-offs spelled out: artisanal versus large-scale gold mining.
• What certification changes on the ground in small-scale mining: Fairmined Gold.

Sources

1. planetGOLD, An Introduction to ASGM (ongoing) – World Gold Council, Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining (ongoing) ↩
2. IGF / IISD, Global Trends in Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining (ASM), 2018 – share of employment in gold mining p. 3; regional figures (2014 data, all commodities) and population shares (2009); quote on the poverty-driven nature of the sector. On the share of production additionally UNEP Global Mercury Partnership (12–15 %) and World Gold Council (up to 20 %). ↩
3. OECD, Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible Supply Chains of Minerals from Conflict-Affected and High-Risk Areas, 3rd edition 2016, definitions – quoted verbatim by the LBMA and the European Commission. ↩
4. National Mining Association, Historical Gold Prices 1833 to Present (2001 annual average: 271 USD/oz) ↩
5. Fortune, Current price of gold: September 9, 2026 ↩
6. ILO (1999), cited in IGF / IISD 2018 – World Bank, A new era of renewal in artisanal mining, February 14, 2025 (figures cover all of small-scale mining, not gold alone). ↩
7. Seccatore, Veiga, Origliasso, Marin, De Tomi, An estimation of the artisanal small-scale production of gold in the world, Science of the Total Environment, 2014 (reference year 2011) ↩
8. Cheng, Watari, Seccatore, Nakajima, Nansai, Takaoka, A review of gold production, mercury consumption, and emission in artisanal and small-scale gold mining, Resources Policy 81, 2023, DOI 10.1016/j.resourpol.2023.103370 ↩
9. UNEP Global Mercury Partnership, Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining (ASGM) (ongoing) – IGF, Transforming ASGM: Progress in Formalization, February 2025 ↩
10. planetGOLD, Frequently Asked Questions, 2024 ↩
11. World Gold Council / Metals Focus, Gold Demand Trends Full Year 2025 – Supply, January 29, 2026 ↩
12. Own calculation based on sources 9, 10, and 11: 15–20 million people employed directly at 500–600 t annual production gives roughly 25–40 people per kilogram of gold; for industrial gold mining, roughly 1 million employed at around 3,100 t, so roughly 0.3 per kilogram. Consistent with Patrick Schein, How to decarbonize your gold supply chain, November 13, 2022, based on World Gold Council data: "by using 1 kilogram of ASM gold you provide 100 times more jobs." ↩
13. UNEP / Artisanal Gold Council, Reducing Mercury Use in Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining: A Practical Guide, 2012).pdf ↩
14. S&P Global Market Intelligence, Greenhouse gas and gold mines: Nearly 1 tonne of CO2 equivalent emitted per ounce of gold produced in 2019, analysis of ore grades and emissions in gold mining, reference year 2019 ↩
15. Nassar, Lederer, Brainard, Padilla, Lessard, Rock-to-Metal Ratio: A Foundational Metric for Understanding Mine Wastes, Environmental Science & Technology 56(10), 2022 – supplemented by Norgate & Haque, Journal of Cleaner Production 29–30, 2012. The small-scale mining figure is our own derivation from the ore grades in source 13. ↩
16. Nyamunda, Review of the Impact on Water Quality and Treatment Options of Cyanide Used in Gold Ore Processing, IntechOpen, 2017 ↩
17. planetGOLD, country pages Ecuador and Bolivia ↩
18. UNEP Global Mercury Partnership, Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining (ASGM) (ongoing) ↩
19. Telmer & Veiga, World emissions of mercury from artisanal and small scale gold mining, 2008 ↩
20. Fritz, Peregovich, da Silva Tenório, da Silva Alves, Schmidt, Mercury and CO2 emissions from artisanal gold mining in Brazilian Amazon rainforest, Nature Sustainability 7, 2024 (47 sites in the Tapajós basin) ↩
21. planetGOLD / Artisanal Gold Council, Best Management Practices for Cyanide Use in the Small-Scale Gold Mining Sector, December 2021, p. 5 and p. 24 – on aquatic sensitivity: "There is a wide difference in toxicity of CN to aquatic biota compared with terrestrial biota, with aquatic biota being more susceptible" (p. 24). ↩
22. Leung & Lu, Environmental Health and Safety Hazards of Indigenous Small-Scale Gold Mining Using Cyanidation in the Philippines, Environmental Health Insights 10, 2016, pp. 125–131, DOI 10.4137/EHI.S38459 (34 small-scale miners surveyed in Benguet) ↩
23. Zhang, Chen, An, Lin, Gong et al., Overlooked deforestation from global mining activities in the 21st century, Nature Communications 17:804, December 21, 2025 ↩
24. MAAP (Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project) #226, AI to detect Amazon gold mining deforestation – 2024 update, May 4, 2025 ↩
25. MAAP #233, Current Situation of Gold Mining in the Peruvian Amazon, September 29, 2025 ↩
26. Ulrich, Trench, Hagemann, Gold mining greenhouse gas emissions, abatement measures, and the impact of a carbon price, Journal of Cleaner Production 340, 2022 (194 mines in 35 countries, Scope 1+2) – supplemented by World Gold Council, Gold and climate change: Current and future impacts, 2019. ↩
27. International Labour Organization (ILO), Child Labour in Mining and Global Supply Chains, 2019 ↩
28. Geenen, Stoop & Verpoorten, How much do artisanal miners earn? An inquiry among Congolese gold miners, Resources Policy, 2021, pp. 12–13 ↩
29. OECD, Illicit Financial Flows: Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining in Ghana and Liberia, 2020, p. 31 ↩
30. planetGOLD / The Impact Facility, Overcoming Practical Barriers for Integrating Responsible ASM Gold into International Supply Chains, September 2022, p. 5 and pp. 30–31 ↩
31. IPIS, Analysis of the interactive map of artisanal mining areas in eastern DRC – 2023 update, Antwerp, 2023 (survey June 2021 to June 2023, 829 sites, around 132,320 miners) ↩
32. SWISSAID, On the trail of African gold, May 30, 2024 (54 countries, data series 2012 to 2022) ↩
33. IUCN NL, Recycled but not responsible: loopholes in recycled gold from the Amazon, May 7, 2025 ↩
34. Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), Traffickers Leave No Stone Unturned, July 24, 2025, cited via IPEN ↩
35. Fairmined Standard for Gold from Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining, Version 2.0 (2014), section 2.1 Intent, p. 26 ↩
36. London Bullion Market Association (LBMA), Towards an LBMA Good Delivery List for Artisanal and Small-Scale Responsibly Mined Gold, October 2022 (2020/21 data) ↩
37. Metalor, Metalor to stop all artisanal mining and mine collectors business, June 17, 2019 ↩
38. Stoop, Verpoorten, van der Windt, More legislation, more violence? The impact of Dodd-Frank in the DRC, PLOS ONE, 2018, DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0201783 ↩
39. ECDPM, Artisanal gold mining in DRC: time to get down to earth, Discussion Paper 223, Karim Karaki, March 2018, p. 3 and p. 12 ↩
40. Alliance for Responsible Mining, Carbon Footprint in Artisanal and Small-scale Mining (ASM), May 5, 2024 (GHG Protocol, all three scopes, five operations in Colombia and Peru) ↩