Gold Mining’s Environmental Impact, Explained

For every gram of gold, industrial mining moves around three tonnes of rock – some 18 tonnes for a single wedding ring. Gold is also the largest single driver of mining-related deforestation, and its small-scale half is the world's biggest man-made source of mercury. How much damage a gram of gold does depends on where and how it was mined.

Key Insights

• Gold mining's environmental impact starts with the rarity of gold. Industrial mines move around three tonnes of ore and waste rock for every gram of gold – roughly 18 tonnes for an 8-gram wedding ring in 18-karat gold.
• Gold is the largest single driver of forest loss from mining. It accounts for almost 42 % of the 19,765 square kilometers of forest that mining destroyed between 2001 and 2023, and nearly three quarters of that happened at mines that appear in no official register.
• Mercury from small-scale gold mining does not stay at the mine. It travels through rivers into fish and into people who have never seen a mine. In six Brazilian Amazon states, more than a fifth of the fish sold at markets exceeded the safe limit.
• Some of the world's largest mines still discharge their waste into rivers. Porgera, Grasberg and Ok Tedi send tailings into river systems today. Grasberg alone has released around 1.85 billion tonnes this way.
• The bill often arrives after the gold is gone. The United States alone counts more than 100,000 abandoned hardrock mine sites, with cleanup costs estimated at 50 billion US dollars or more.

Table of Contents

• Why gold mining leaves such a large footprint
• Clearing the ground: forests and protected areas
• Moving mountains: pits, waste rock and glaciers
• Separating the gold: mercury and cyanide
• Where the waste goes: dams, rivers and the sea
• Water: thirst, mud and acid
• Energy and climate
• After the gold is gone
• Three gold claims that don't hold up
• Is there a better way?
• FAQ: gold mining's environmental impact
• Key takeaways
• Further reading
• Sources

Why gold mining leaves such a large footprint

Gold mining's environmental impact starts with a simple fact about the metal: there is very little of it. Industrial open-pit mines process ore averaging around 1.05 grams of gold per tonne of rock.¹ To reach that ore, they also have to remove overburden and barren rock. Across the world's industrial gold mines, the result is a rock-to-metal ratio of about 3,000,000 to 1 – roughly three tonnes of ore and waste rock for every gram of gold, the highest of the 25 commodities studied.²

Everything else scales with that number: diesel for the haul trucks, electricity for the mills, water and chemicals for processing, and the waste that has to be stored forever. Ore grades are falling, too. Gold head grades dropped by 13.4 % between 2010 and 2023,³ so every gram takes more rock than it used to.

What one wedding ring leaves behind

An 8-gram wedding ring in 18-karat gold contains 6 grams of fine gold. Mined conventionally, with nobody asking where it came from, those 6 grams can stand for:

• Around 18 tonnes of ore and waste rock, at the global average of industrial gold mining.
• Roughly 140 to 200 kilograms of CO₂ equivalent, depending on which industry-wide estimate you use.
• Around 30 grams of mercury released, if the gold came from small-scale miners amalgamating the whole ore – five times the weight of the gold itself.
• About 34 square meters of rainforest, roughly two trees, if it came from illegal alluvial mining in the Brazilian Amazon.⁴

These averages describe very different kinds of mining, and no single ring carries all four. But every one of them is real somewhere.

The method, not the metal

Gold does not cause this damage by itself. The method and the oversight do. Around 80 to 85 % of the world's mined gold comes from large-scale gold mining, the remaining 15 to 20 % from artisanal and small-scale gold mining, which employs the vast majority of the people working in the sector.⁵

Mercury pollution and most of the forest loss trace back to informal and illegal small-scale mining, above all in riverbeds. Tailings disasters, rivers used as waste channels and acid water that flows for centuries are mostly the legacy of industrial operations. Both halves of the industry have clean and dirty mines. That is why our overview of gold mining and this article keep coming back to the same question: which mine, run how?

Clearing the ground: forests and protected areas

Gold is the largest single driver of mining-related deforestation worldwide. Between 2001 and 2023, mining directly destroyed 19,765 square kilometers of forest. Gold accounted for 41.7 % of it, ahead of coal at 26.3 %.⁶ That is roughly 8,200 square kilometers for gold alone, an area about the size of Puerto Rico.⁷

The same study found that 73.2 % of gold-related forest loss came from mining that appears in no official register.⁶ The damage is concentrated where nobody is counting.

The Amazon: a frontier moving along the rivers

Nowhere is this clearer than in the Amazon. The region's cumulative gold mining footprint passed 2 million hectares in 2024, more than half of it opened up since 2019.⁸ In 2025 alone, gold mining cleared another 37,109 hectares across the Amazon, more than 14,000 of them inside protected areas or Indigenous territories.⁹ In Peru, 97.5 % of the 139,169 hectares damaged by mid-2025 lie in a single region, Madre de Dios.¹⁰

The machinery shows the scale. On one overflight in July 2025, Greenpeace Brazil counted 542 illegal dredging rafts on the Madeira River.¹¹ In the Tapajós basin, the area mined for gold grew from 15.4 square kilometers in 1973 to 261.7 square kilometers in 2012.¹²

Alluvial mining follows the same sequence everywhere: clear the forest, strip the soil, wash the gold-bearing gravel with high-pressure water. What remains is a landscape of sand, gravel and standing pools.

Industrial mines clear forest, too

Large-scale mining removes forest as well, and its effects reach far beyond the fence. Across 26 tropical countries, industrial mining of all commodities directly destroyed 3,264 square kilometers of forest between 2000 and 2019, with 80 % of the loss in Indonesia, Brazil, Ghana and Suriname.¹³

The indirect effects are larger still. In Brazil's Amazon, roads, settlements and supply chains linked to mining of all kinds drove forest loss up to 70 kilometers beyond lease boundaries. Deforestation caused by mining was 12 times greater than inside the leases alone.¹⁴

Mining at the edge of protected areas

In 2019, half of the world's metal ore extraction took place within 20 kilometers of a protected area, and extraction inside protected areas more than doubled between 2000 and 2019.¹⁵ Gold's own land footprint is large. In a 2026 global mapping, gold accounted for 21.1 % of the world's mapped mining area, second only to coal.¹⁶

Enforcement works

The picture can change. In Brazil's Yanomami Indigenous Territory, newly opened illegal mining area fell from about 1,800 hectares in 2022 to 45 hectares in 2025, after the federal government intervened in 2023.¹⁷ The damage is not inevitable. It follows from where mining is allowed, tolerated or stopped.

Moving mountains: pits, waste rock and glaciers

Low grades mean moving mountains, literally. Gold alone accounted for about 9.1 billion tonnes of the material moved by mining worldwide in 2018.² Spread over the year, that is around 25 million tonnes a day, the weight of about four Great Pyramids of Giza.¹⁸ Most of it stays on site, as waste rock dumps and tailings.

Figures on mine waste depend on the system boundary. A life-cycle assessment of a modeled gold mine working ore with 3.5 grams per tonne arrives at 1,270 tonnes of solid waste per kilogram of gold.¹⁹ The global rock-to-metal ratio gives around 3,000 tonnes.² The first describes one modeled operation, the second all ore and waste rock moved across the industry's reporting mines, including very low-grade ones. Both lead to the same conclusion: a kilogram of gold means a mountain of rock.

How much rock depends on the deposit. Industrial underground mines work richer ore, averaging 3.25 grams per tonne, and therefore need around a third of the ore per gram that an open pit does.²⁰ Richer rock means less rock moved, less energy and fewer emissions per gram.

When the waste lands on a glacier

At the Kumtor gold mine in Kyrgyzstan, waste rock was dumped onto glaciers in layers up to 180 meters thick. Researchers found that the load pushed two glacier tongues forward by 1.2 and 3.2 kilometers over 15 years, at a rate of up to 350 meters a year.²¹

Separating the gold: mercury and cyanide

Once the ore is crushed, the gold has to be separated from it, and the chemistry used shapes what happens to the surrounding land and water for decades. Small-scale miners mostly use mercury, industrial mines use cyanide.

Mercury: from the mine to the dinner plate

Artisanal and small-scale gold mining is the world's largest man-made source of mercury. For the 2015 inventory year, it accounted for 838 tonnes of mercury emissions to air, 37.7 % of the global anthropogenic total.²² Miners bind gold particles into an amalgam with mercury and then burn the mercury off. Where the whole ore is amalgamated and the amalgam burned in the open, around 5 kilograms of mercury are used per kilogram of gold, practically all of it lost. Roughly a third goes into the air, two thirds into tailings, soil and rivers.²³

In water, microorganisms turn mercury into methylmercury, which builds up along the food chain. The World Health Organization counts mercury among the ten chemicals of greatest public health concern and warns that methylmercury exposure poses a danger to the unborn child.²⁴

The Amazon shows where it ends up. Of 1,010 fish bought at markets in 17 municipalities across six Brazilian Amazon states, 21.3 % contained mercury at or above the safe limit of 0.5 micrograms per gram. In the state of Roraima, it was 40 %.²⁵ Among the Munduruku people on the Tapajós River, 57.9 % of 197 hair samples reached 6 micrograms per gram or more.²⁶ In nine Yanomami villages, 84 % of 287 people tested were above 2 micrograms per gram.²⁷ All three studies come from the Brazilian Amazon. They show what mercury does where gold mining is intense, not a global average.

Mercury does not go away. Around 60 % of the mercury deposited from the atmosphere today is legacy mercury re-emitted from past releases, across all sources.²⁸ California still lives with its Gold Rush: an estimated 10 million pounds of mercury, around 4,500 tonnes, were lost from placer mining alone, and fish consumption advisories remain in place across the region.²⁹

The method makes the difference. Concentrating the ore first and recovering the mercury with a simple retort cut releases to 0.19 kilograms per kilogram of gold in a field study in the Brazilian Amazon – around 25 times less than burning whole-ore amalgam in the open.³⁰ We explain the processing steps in our overview of artisanal and small-scale gold mining.

What the Minamata Convention does

The Minamata Convention on Mercury is the global treaty to protect human health and the environment from mercury. Adopted in 2013 and in force since 2017, it has 152 parties.³¹ Countries where small-scale gold mining is more than insignificant have to draw up national action plans and work to eliminate four worst practices: amalgamating the whole ore, burning amalgam in the open, burning amalgam in residential areas, and leaching mercury-contaminated sediment, ore or tailings with cyanide without first removing the mercury.³¹

What the convention does not do is ban mercury in gold mining. At their sixth conference in November 2025, the parties set no phase-out date for small-scale mining and focused on action plans, supply-chain transparency and the illegal mercury trade.³²

Cyanide: the lesser evil, often badly managed

Industrial mines dissolve gold with cyanide, and they need a lot of it. Operating data from Australian mines show an average of around 150 kilograms of sodium cyanide per kilogram of gold, rising above 1,000 kilograms where the ore holds less than 2 grams per tonne.³³ Cyanide is acutely toxic, and spills can kill a river quickly. In 2000, a tailings dam at a plant reprocessing old gold waste at Baia Mare in Romania released around 100,000 cubic meters of cyanide-contaminated water, which traveled through the Tisza into the Danube.³⁴

Still, cyanide is the lesser evil compared with mercury. It does not accumulate in the body or the food chain, and it breaks down in the environment.³⁵ The problem is how it is managed. In small-scale mining, a practical guide found that cyanide use "often occurs in the absence of critical safeguards and responsible management practices".³⁶ In the Philippines, researchers found leaching ponds as close as 5 meters to homes and elevated cyanide levels in the blood of 35 % of the miners examined.³⁷

Industrial mines can sign up to the International Cyanide Management Code, which is audited by independent auditors. At the end of 2025, 115 mines were certified.³⁸ The code is voluntary, and the institute behind it states that it "cannot impose penalties".³⁹

Where the waste goes: dams, rivers and the sea

Processing leaves behind tailings: finely ground rock mixed with water and residual chemicals. Most mines store them behind dams that have to hold for as long as the waste exists, which in practice means forever. A 2021 study estimated around 8,100 tailings facilities worldwide across all commodities. Of the 1,743 whose operators disclosed data, 29 % had never formally assessed what a catastrophic failure would do downstream.⁴⁰

When the dam breaks

Between 1915 and 2020, 366 tailings dam failures were recorded across all commodities, and the rate has been rising again.⁴¹ Gold has its own share of the record:

• Merriespruit, South Africa, 1994: around 600,000 cubic meters of liquid tailings flowed into a residential area and killed 17 people.⁴²
• Baia Mare, Romania, 2000: cyanide-contaminated water reached the Danube.³⁴
• Mount Polley, Canada, 2014: the tailings dam of a copper-gold mine breached; federal charges followed a decade later.⁴³
• Çöpler, Türkiye, 2024: a heap leach pad collapsed and killed nine workers.⁴⁴
• Eagle Gold, Canada, 2024: a heap leach failure in Yukon released cyanide-bearing solution into the environment.⁴⁵

After the collapse at Brumadinho in 2019, the industry adopted the Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management. By August 2025, 67 % of the 836 tailings facilities operated by members of the International Council on Mining and Metals fully conformed with it, and the deadlines for the rest had passed.⁴⁶

When there is no dam at all

Some mines skip the dam and use a river instead. In 2013, an international assessment published by the International Maritime Organization found that riverine disposal "is no longer practiced, except at four mines in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea": Grasberg, Ok Tedi, Porgera and Tolukuma.⁴⁷

Three of them still do it today. Freeport-McMoRan describes a "controlled riverine tailings management system" at Grasberg, its copper-gold mine in Indonesian Papua. By the end of 2025 it had sent around 1.85 billion tonnes of tailings down the river into a deposition area of about 230 square kilometers.⁴⁸ At Ok Tedi, a copper-gold mine in Papua New Guinea, the operator states that the remaining tailings are "disposed of via discharge into the river system, as approved by the Government in 1986".⁴⁹

At the Porgera gold mine, also in Papua New Guinea, a 2025 audit describes a processing plant that "ultimately discharges to a riverine disposal point" – and certifies full compliance with the International Cyanide Management Code.⁵⁰ A certificate for handling one chemical says little about where the waste ends up. The fourth mine, Tolukuma, is restarting. Its permit still includes partial riverine tailings disposal, although its new owner says it aims for zero tailings discharge.⁵¹

Into the deep sea

A handful of mines pipe their tailings into the ocean. At Batu Hijau, a copper-gold mine in Indonesia, the outfall releases tailings 125 meters below sea level into a submarine canyon.⁵² At Simberi in Papua New Guinea, the operator plans to send the tailings of its gold expansion "via the existing deep sea tailings placement (DSTP) pipeline".⁵³

The rules are tightening only slowly. The World Gold Council's Responsible Gold Mining Principles exclude riverine and shallow submarine tailings, but only for new mines.⁵⁴ The IRMA Standard goes further: it does not certify any mine that disposes of mine waste in rivers, lakes or the sea.⁵⁵

Water: thirst, mud and acid

Gold mining needs a lot of water, and it often operates where water is scarce. Operating data from Australian mines put consumption at around 477 cubic meters per kilogram of gold,³³ while a benchmark of 278 mines arrives at around 675 cubic meters.⁵⁶ A study of small and medium-scale mining in Colombia measured about 80 cubic meters of blue water per kilogram.⁵⁷ The methods differ, so the numbers show orders of magnitude, not a ranking.

Location makes it harder. In a global study of metal mining, 90 % of the extraction sites examined lay in areas with below-average water availability, with copper and gold mining in particular taking place where water is significantly scarce.¹⁵ The industry's own data point the same way: of more than 12,000 mining and metals facilities worldwide, 65.7 % face at least one significant physical water risk.⁵⁸

Where water is scarce, mines and communities compete for it. At Pascua-Lama, a gold project high in the Chilean Andes, the environmental regulator ordered closure after repeated violations. An environmental court confirmed permanent closure in 2020, and Chile's Supreme Court upheld the sanctions in 2022.⁵⁹

Mud in the rivers

Alluvial mining turns rivers brown. A global satellite study found mining sediment in 173 rivers in 49 countries. In 80 % of them, suspended sediment had more than doubled compared with pre-mining levels. Around 35,000 kilometers of river, 6 % of all large tropical river reaches, are affected, and gold mining is the main driver.⁶⁰ The authors link the sediment to degraded ecosystems and threats to human health.

Acid water that flows for centuries

Many gold ores contain sulfide minerals such as pyrite. Exposed to air and water, they produce sulfuric acid that dissolves heavy metals: acid mine drainage. It keeps flowing long after mining ends.⁶¹

The waste rock described earlier is a large part of the problem. The overburden and barren rock moved to reach the ore often contains the same sulfides. Piled up in dumps and exposed to rain, it can release acid together with dissolved metals such as copper, lead, zinc and cadmium, and metalloids such as arsenic, selenium and antimony.⁶² The International Council on Mining and Metals itself warns that poorly managed sulfide-bearing waste can produce "highly acidic water that can leach metals from the rock into the surrounding environment".⁶¹

Metals can leak even when the water is not acidic. Industry guidance describes neutral mine drainage, with elevated metal concentrations at near-neutral pH. And once the reaction has started, it can continue "for decades or centuries after mining has ceased".⁶²

South Africa's Witwatersrand shows the long tail. The basin holds 270 tailings dams and 380 mine residue dumps with around 6 billion tonnes of pyrite-bearing tailings and 600,000 tonnes of low-grade uranium. Radiation measurements on the tailings gave an external hazard index of 2.4, where anything above 1 is considered a significant health risk.⁶³ Water decanting from flooded mines in the Western Basin carries around 3,500 milligrams of sulfate per liter at a pH of 2 to 3, and the problem "is likely to persist for centuries rather than decades".⁶⁴

In the United States, the Forest Service estimates that around 10,000 miles of rivers and streams may have been contaminated by acid mine drainage from hardrock mining of all kinds.⁶⁵

Energy and climate

Moving and grinding that much rock takes a lot of energy. Industrial gold mining emits around 23 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent per kilogram of gold on average, based on Scope 1 and 2 emissions of 194 mines in 35 countries.⁶⁶ The World Gold Council's own estimate for the same year is around 33 tonnes.⁶⁷

The spread between mines is enormous: from about 1.7 tonnes at the cleanest mine on record to 169 tonnes at the dirtiest, a factor of around 100.⁶⁶ Power supply is one key reason. South Africa, with its deep mines and coal-fired grid, produces 4 % of the world's gold but accounts for 43 % of the sector's emissions from purchased electricity.⁶⁸

Small-scale mining is not automatically cleaner. Across 47 sites in the Brazilian Amazon, diesel-powered operations averaged around 16 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent per kilogram of gold, with a range of 10 to 30 tonnes depending on the mining method.³⁰ That figure rests on a single regional field study, so it indicates an order of magnitude rather than a global average. Deforestation adds to the total: forest cleared for gold mining between 2001 and 2023 released around 0.39 billion tonnes of CO₂.⁶

The category tells you little. The individual mine tells you a lot.

After the gold is gone

Closing a mine properly means treating the water, stabilizing the waste and restoring the land. That work falls due at the moment the revenue stops, and many operations never get there. The documented backlog, across all commodities:

• United States: more than 100,000 abandoned hardrock mine sites, with cleanup costs estimated at 50 billion US dollars or more.⁶⁹
• Australia: more than 50,000 closed and abandoned mines and quarries, against around 10 billion Australian dollars in environmental bonds that may not even cover the liabilities of operating mines.⁷⁰
• South Africa: around 6,100 derelict and ownerless mines, many of them former gold mines. By March 2021, none of the 2,322 high-risk sites outside asbestos had been rehabilitated, and the mining department puts the cleanup bill at around 49 billion rand.⁷¹

Two gold mines that became public bills

At Summitville in Colorado, a gold mine using cyanide heap leaching operated from 1986 to 1991 before its owner went bankrupt. The federal and state governments have since spent more than 200 million US dollars on remediation, and water treatment continues.⁷²

At Giant Mine in Yellowknife, Canada, roasting gold ore left around 237,000 tonnes of arsenic trioxide dust stored underground. The government's estimate for the remediation project stands at about 4.38 billion Canadian dollars, paid for by the public.⁷³

Does rehabilitation work?

Nobody can say for certain. A review of 712 publications from 54 countries, covering five decades of mine restoration research, found no systematic success rate. Most assessments compare different sites instead of monitoring the same site over time.⁷⁴

The liability is at least being booked. Across 24 large mining companies of all commodities, provisions for closure and rehabilitation grew from 40 billion US dollars in 2013 to 72 billion in 2023, about 42 % of their long-term debt.⁷⁵

There are hopeful examples. At Kidston in Queensland, Australia, a closed gold mine is being turned into a 250-megawatt pumped-storage hydropower plant, with completion targeted for December 2026.⁷⁶

Three gold claims that don't hold up

"The worst tailings disasters were at gold mines"

The two most-cited disasters happened at iron ore mines. The Fundão dam near Mariana in Brazil collapsed in 2015 and killed 19 people;⁷⁷ Brumadinho followed in 2019 with 272 deaths.⁷⁸ Both changed how the whole industry handles tailings. Using them as gold examples is inaccurate, and gold's own record is serious enough without them.

"Recycled gold solves the problem"

Recycled gold changes nothing in the places described in this article. It has not reduced mining. Between 2014 and 2025, annual mine production rose from 3,114 to a record 3,672 tonnes, while recycled gold stayed at 26 to 28 % of total supply.⁷⁹ The increase in mining alone, around 557 tonnes a year, is larger than Australia's entire annual output.⁸⁰

Recycling volumes respond to the gold price and to what owners decide to sell, not to jewelers' sourcing choices.⁷⁹ And weak definitions allow freshly mined gold to be relabeled as recycled after a single refining step.⁸¹ More on this in our article on why regular recycled gold is not a solution.

"Cyanide is worse than mercury"

Cyanide sounds more frightening, and it is acutely toxic. But it breaks down in the environment and does not accumulate in the food chain, while mercury persists and builds up in fish and people for generations.³⁵ Used under control, cyanide is part of the way out of mercury: it recovers far more of the gold, often around 90 %, against rarely more than 30 % with whole-ore amalgamation.⁸²

Is there a better way?

Yes – and it starts with knowing which mine your gold comes from. Every problem in this article is tied to a method and a place, so the answer lies in choosing both. That takes documentation: once refined to 999.9 fineness, gold from one mine cannot be told apart from gold from any other. Paperwork alone is not proof either: in Brazil, Greenpeace identified 98 mining permits with irregularities through which 25.3 tonnes of gold had been declared.⁸³ A few systems attach binding requirements to the mine itself and have them checked independently:

• The Fairmined Standard for small-scale mining is aligned with the Minamata Convention and rules out its four worst mercury practices. Fairmined Ecological Gold goes further: it is recovered without mercury or cyanide, using gravity methods only.⁸⁴
• The Fairtrade Gold Standard requires retorts for mercury, excludes mining in protected areas and requires mined land to be rehabilitated within two years of closure.⁸⁵
• Swiss Better Gold accredits small-scale mines in Colombia and Peru against 27 criteria checked by independent verifiers. Its climate criterion covers the measurement of Scope 1 and 2 emissions, water efficiency, soil conservation and mine restoration; across accredited operations, water recirculation averages 86 %.⁸⁶
• Single Mine Origin keeps every batch of ethically mined gold from large-scale mines traceable to one named member mine.⁸⁷
• The IRMA Standard is the most demanding standard for large-scale mining, although no primary gold mine has yet completed an assessment against it.⁸⁸

What these approaches change on the ground is the subject of our articles on responsible small-scale gold mining and responsible large-scale gold mining.

FAQ: gold mining's environmental impact

Key takeaways

• Ask which mine, not which category. Clean and dirty operations exist in both large- and small-scale mining, and the carbon footprint alone varies a hundredfold between individual mines.
• Mercury is where small-scale gold does the most harm – and where proven fixes exist. Concentration and retorts cut releases around 25-fold, and certified gold recovered entirely without mercury already exists.
• The worst industrial damage is built in at the start. Rivers used as tailings channels, dams that must hold forever and acid water for centuries follow from how a mine is designed and regulated, long before the first bar is sold.
• Recycled gold is not a way out. Mine production reached a record in 2025, and recycling changes nothing about forests, rivers or mercury.
• Documented origin is the only way to know. Refined gold looks the same whatever its source, so only a traceable chain back to the mine tells you what your gold has caused.

What to do next

Gold will keep being mined for as long as people value it. The real question is where and how. We try to offer an alternative: gold with documented origin, from mines that work under binding standards. Take a look at the ethical gold in our shop – or ask us what would fit your production.

Further reading

• The whole industry at a glance: gold mining explained.
• The human side of the same story: gold mining's social impact.
• How the two halves of the industry compare: artisanal versus large-scale gold mining.

Sources

1. S&P Global Market Intelligence, Greenhouse gas and gold mines, reference year 2019: average grade around 1.05 g/t for open-pit and 3.25 g/t for underground operations. ↩
2. Nassar, Lederer, Brainard, Padilla & Lessard, Rock-to-Metal Ratio: A Foundational Metric for Understanding Mine Wastes, Environmental Science & Technology 56(10), 2022, open access. Ratios run "from 3 for Si to 3 × 10⁶ for gold"; gold accounts for "approximately 9.1 billion metric tons" of material moved. The ratio is ore plus overburden and barren rock divided by refined metal, based on 777 reporting industrial operations covering about 79 % of world production, reference year 2018. Small-scale mining is not included. ↩
3. S&P Global Market Intelligence, Gold mine stripping ratios rise on high prices, grades continue declining, December 12, 2023: "Since 2010, copper and gold head grades have dropped 7.6% and 13.4%, respectively." ↩
4. Our own calculations for an 8-gram ring in 750 alloy (18 karat) containing 6 grams of fine gold. Rock: 6 g × 3 t/g = 18 t of ore and waste rock, using the global rock-to-metal ratio of industrial gold mining (Nassar et al. 2022). CO₂: 6 g × 23.3 kg/g = 140 kg and 6 g × 32.7 kg/g = 196 kg, using the industry averages of 23.3 t CO₂e/kg (Ulrich, Trench & Hagemann 2022, Scope 1 and 2, 194 mines) and 32.7 t CO₂e/kg (World Gold Council 2019, Scope 1 and 2); both are estimates for the same reference year with different samples, not a range with a mean. Mercury: 6 g × 5 kg/kg = 30 g, using the average of around 5 kg of mercury per kg of gold for whole-ore amalgamation (range 3–50 kg), practically all of it released (Telmer & Veiga 2008); with concentrate amalgamation and a retort, releases fall to 6 g × 0.19 kg/kg ≈ 1.1 g (Fritz et al. 2024). Forest: 6 g × 0.57 ha/kg = 0.0034 ha ≈ 34 m²; at a median density of 565 trees with a trunk diameter of at least 10 cm per hectare across the Amazon (ter Steege et al., Hyperdominance in the Amazonian Tree Flora, Science 342, 2013), 0.0034 ha × 565 ≈ 1.9 trees, using the 0.57 ha of land cleared per kg of gold for illegal alluvial mining in the Tapajós basin in 2020 (Gasparinetti et al., Economic valuation of artisanal small-scale gold mining impacts.pdf), Resources Policy 88, 2024). The four figures describe different kinds of mining and must not be added up. ↩
5. planetGOLD, Frequently Asked Questions, 2024 (artisanal and small-scale mining produces 500–600 t a year); World Gold Council / Metals Focus, Gold Demand Trends Full Year 2025 – Supply, January 2026 (world mine production of 3,671.6 t in 2025); World Gold Council, Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining (up to 20 % of annual supply). 500–600 t of 3,671.6 t is 14–16 %; we use a range of 15 to 20 % to reflect the higher estimates. On employment: IGF / IISD, Global Trends in Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining, 2018, p. 3 (artisanal operators account for "90 per cent of total employment in gold mining"). ↩
6. Zhang, Chen, An, Lin, Gong et al., Overlooked deforestation from global mining activities in the 21st century, Nature Communications 17:804, 2025: 19,765 km² of forest loss from mining worldwide 2001–2023; gold 41.71 %, coal 26.33 %; 73.21 % of gold-related loss from unrecorded mining activities; 0.75 billion t CO₂ in total, of which around 0.39 billion t from gold mining. ↩
7. Our own calculation: 19,765 km² × 41.71 % = 8,244 km². Puerto Rico has a land area of about 8,900 km² (US Census Bureau). ↩
8. MAAP (Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project) #226, AI to detect Amazon gold mining deforestation – 2024 update, May 4, 2025: cumulative mining footprint of 2.02 million ha in 2024, of which 1.06 million ha between 2019 and 2024. ↩
9. MAAP #235, Amazon gold mining deforestation 2025, 2025: 37,109 ha of forest lost to gold mining across the Amazon in 2025, of which more than 14,000 ha in protected areas or Indigenous territories. ↩
10. MAAP #233, Current Situation of Gold Mining in the Peruvian Amazon, September 29, 2025: 139,169 ha cumulative by mid-2025, 97.5 % of it in Madre de Dios. ↩
11. Greenpeace Brasil, Greenpeace flagra mais de 500 balsas de garimpo em sobrevoo no Rio Madeira, July 2025: 542 dredging rafts counted on an overflight on July 19, 2025. The organization's own monitoring. ↩
12. Lobo, Costa, Novo & Telmer, Distribution of Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining in the Tapajós River Basin (Brazilian Amazon) over the Past 40 Years and Relationship with Water Siltation, Remote Sensing 8(7):579, 2016. ↩
13. Giljum, Maus, Kuschnig et al., A pantropical assessment of deforestation caused by industrial mining, PNAS 119(38), 2022: "3,264 km² of forest was directly lost due to industrial mining, with 80% occurring in only four countries: Indonesia, Brazil, Ghana, and Suriname." All commodities; gold is not reported separately. ↩
14. Sonter, Herrera, Barrett, Galford, Moran & Soares-Filho, Mining drives extensive deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, Nature Communications 8:1013, 2017: "Mining significantly increased Amazon forest loss up to 70 km beyond mining lease boundaries"; mining-induced deforestation "has been 12 times greater than that occurring within mining leases alone". All mining, not gold alone. ↩
15. Luckeneder, Giljum, Schaffartzik, Maus & Tost, Surge in global metal mining threatens vulnerable ecosystems, Global Environmental Change 69:102303, 2021: "90% of all considered extraction sites correspond to below-average relative water availability, with particularly copper and gold mining occurring in areas with significant water scarcity." On protected areas see the accompanying FINEPRINT brief: "50% of all global metal ore extraction took place within a 20 km boundary around protected territories"; mining in protected areas rose from 225 Mt to 480 Mt, "a 113% increase". All metal ores. ↩
16. Maus et al., A data-driven approach to mapping global commodity-specific mining land-use, Journal of Cleaner Production 540:147437, 2026: coal 22.5 % and gold 21.1 % of the global mapped mining land footprint; mapping base 2019. ↩
17. Instituto Socioambiental, Relatório aponta redução do garimpo ilegal na Terra Indígena Yanomami, May 22, 2026: newly opened mining area of about 1,800 ha in 2022, 330 ha in 2023, 84 ha in 2024 and 45.2 ha in 2025. ↩
18. Our own calculation: 9.1 billion t ÷ 365 days ≈ 25 million t per day; 9.1 billion t ÷ 6 million t ≈ 1,500 Great Pyramids per year, or about 4 per day. Mass of the Great Pyramid of about 6 million t: Wikipedia, Great Pyramid of Giza, accessed September 2026, based on John Romer, *The Great Pyramid: Ancient Egypt Revisited*, Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 157 (about 5.5 million t of limestone, 8,000 t of granite and 500,000 t of mortar). ↩
19. Norgate & Haque, Using life cycle assessment to evaluate some environmental impacts of gold production, Journal of Cleaner Production 29–30, 2012: "1,270,000 t waste solids/t Au" for a modeled non-refractory ore at 3.5 g/t, equal to 1,270 t per kg. ↩
20. Our own calculation from the grades in note 1: 1.05 g/t ÷ 3.25 g/t = 0.32, so an underground mine at average grade needs about a third of the ore per gram of gold (ore only, full recovery assumed). On emissions, the same S&P Global analysis finds markedly lower intensities for underground than for open-pit gold mines, around 12.9 versus 27.3 t CO₂e per kg of gold after conversion from per-ounce figures. ↩
21. Jamieson, Ewertowski & Evans, Rapid advance of two mountain glaciers in response to mine-related debris loading, Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface 120(7), 2015, open access: glaciers advanced "by 1.2 and 3.2 km respectively at a rate of up to 350 m yr−1" after "spoil of up to 180 m thick" was deposited on their surfaces. ↩
22. UN Environment Programme, Global Mercury Assessment 2018, 2019, emissions to air for the 2015 inventory year: artisanal and small-scale gold mining 838 t (37.7 %), large-scale gold production 84.5 t (3.8 %), total anthropogenic emissions 2,220 t. ↩
23. Telmer & Veiga, World emissions of mercury from artisanal and small scale gold mining, 2008: whole-ore amalgamation 3–50 kg of mercury per kg of gold, on average around 5 kg, practically all of it lost; around 35 % of mercury lost goes to the atmosphere and around 65 % to tailings, soil and water. ↩
24. World Health Organization, Mercury and health, fact sheet, October 24, 2024: "Mercury is considered by WHO as one of the top ten chemicals of major public health concern." "Exposure of the fetus to methylmercury poses danger to the unborn child." ↩
25. Basta et al., Risk Assessment of Mercury-Contaminated Fish Consumption in the Brazilian Amazon, Toxics 11(9):800, 2023: 1,010 fish of 80 species from 17 municipalities in six states, sampled March 2021 to September 2022; 21.3 % at or above 0.5 µg/g; Roraima 40 %. ↩
26. Basta, Viana, de Vasconcellos et al., Mercury Exposure in Munduruku Indigenous Communities from Brazilian Amazon: Methodological Background and an Overview of the Principal Results, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18(17):9222, 2021: 57.9 % of 197 hair samples from three Munduruku villages at or above 6 µg/g, fieldwork in 2019. ↩
27. Fiocruz, Yanomamis from nine villages harassed by illegal mining are contaminated with mercury, April 2024: 84 % of 287 hair samples above 2.0 µg/g and 10.8 % above 6.0 µg/g, Upper Mucajaí, data collected in October 2022. ↩
28. Amos, Jacob, Streets & Sunderland, Legacy impacts of all-time anthropogenic emissions on the global mercury cycle, Global Biogeochemical Cycles 27, 2013: around 60 % of present-day atmospheric deposition is legacy mercury re-emitted from past releases, 27 % primary anthropogenic emissions, 13 % natural sources. All sources, not gold alone. ↩
29. Alpers, Hunerlach, May & Hothem, US Geological Survey, Mercury Contamination from Historical Gold Mining in California, Fact Sheet 2005-3014: "The total amount of mercury lost to the environment from placer mining operations throughout California has been estimated at 10,000,000 lb"; a further 3,000,000 lb was lost at hardrock mines. Conversion ours: 10,000,000 lb × 0.4536 kg/lb ≈ 4,500 t. On current fish advisories see the USGS California Water Science Center, *Mercury*. ↩
30. 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; with concentrate and retort, 1.7 kg of mercury used and 0.19 kg released per kg of gold; around 16 t CO₂e per kg of gold on average, 10–30 t depending on the mining method, excluding land-use change. Factor ours: 5 kg ÷ 0.19 kg = 26, stated conservatively as around 25. ↩
31. Minamata Convention on Mercury, Text and annexes, booklet edition October 2024: adopted October 10, 2013, in force since August 16, 2017. Article 7(3): a Party that determines that artisanal and small-scale gold mining in its territory "is more than insignificant" shall develop and implement a national action plan. Annex C, paragraph 1(b): "Actions to eliminate: (i) Whole ore amalgamation; (ii) Open burning of amalgam or processed amalgam; (iii) Burning of amalgam in residential areas; and (iv) Cyanide leaching in sediment, ore or tailings to which mercury has been added without first removing the mercury". Parties: 152, accessed September 2026. ↩
32. IISD Earth Negotiations Bulletin, Summary of the Sixth Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Minamata Convention on Mercury, Geneva, November 3–7, 2025. ↩
33. Mudd, Resource Consumption Intensity and the Sustainability of Gold Mining, 2007, operating data from Australian mines 1995–2006: water "about 477 kL/kg Au"; cyanide on average around 150 kg per kg of gold, below 100 kg/kg above 6 g/t and above 1,000 kg/kg below 2 g/t. ↩
34. UNEP / OCHA, Cyanide Spill at Baia Mare, Romania – Assessment Mission Report, March 2000. ↩
35. Nyamunda, Review of the Impact on Water Quality and Treatment Options of Cyanide Used in Gold Ore Processing, IntechOpen, 2017. ↩
36. planetGOLD / Artisanal Gold Council, Best Management Practices for Cyanide Use in the Small-Scale Gold Mining Sector, December 2021, p. 5. ↩
37. 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 (34 miners surveyed in Benguet). ↩
38. International Cyanide Management Institute, Newsletter Q1 2026: 115 certified mines at the end of 2025; 173 mines certified since 2006. ↩
39. International Cyanide Management Institute, Frequently Asked Questions, accessed September 2026: as a voluntary program, it "cannot impose penalties" beyond decertification. ↩
40. Franks, Stringer, Torres-Cruz et al., Tailings facility disclosures reveal stability risks, Scientific Reports 11:5353, 2021: 1,743 disclosed facilities storing 44.5 billion m³; 501 (29 %) had not formally considered the downstream effects of a hypothetical catastrophic failure; around 8,100 facilities estimated worldwide. All commodities. ↩
41. Islam & Murakami, Global-scale impact analysis of mine tailings dam failures: 1915–2020, Global Environmental Change 70:102361, 2021. All commodities. ↩
42. Fourie, Blight & Papageorgiou, Static liquefaction as a possible explanation for the Merriespruit tailings dam failure, Canadian Geotechnical Journal 38(4), 2001: "Approximately 600 000 m³ of liquid tailings flowed from the tailings dam"; the failure "resulted in the deaths of 17 people". ↩
43. Mining.com, Ten years after Mount Polley dam breach, 15 charges laid, December 2024. ↩
44. SSR Mining, 2024 Çöpler Incident. ↩
45. Government of Yukon, Victoria Gold Corporation's Eagle mine heap leach failure, 2024–2025. ↩
46. ICMM, Tailings Progress Report, November 5, 2025, data as of August 2025: "Out of the total of 836 ICMM member facilities, 67 per cent are in full conformance with the GISTM, while 33 per cent remain in partial conformance." ↩
47. International Maritime Organization / UNEP, International Assessment of Marine and Riverine Disposal of Mine Tailings, 2013. ↩
48. Freeport-McMoRan, Tailings Management – Indonesia, accessed September 2026. ↩
49. Ok Tedi Mining Limited, Tailings Management, accessed September 2026. ↩
50. Cyanide Code audit, New Porgera Ltd, Summary Audit Report, report dated November 27, 2025 (audit March 2025): "The NPL cyanide processing plant is a flow through system that ultimately discharges to a riverine disposal point at less than 0.5 mg/L WAD." ↩
51. Tolu Minerals, Annual Report to Shareholders 2025, March 31, 2026, p. 20: the mine "holds environmental permits for water harvesting and wastewater discharge (which currently includes partial riverine tailings disposal)"; the company states a commitment to a zero tailings discharge approach. ↩
52. Amman Mineral, Processing, accessed September 2026. ↩
53. St Barbara, Feasibility Study Confirms Simberi as a High-Quality Asset, December 10, 2025. ↩
54. World Gold Council, Responsible Gold Mining Principles, principle 8.2: "We will not develop a new mine that would involve the use of riverine or shallow submarine tailings." ↩
55. IRMA, Standard for Responsible Mining, Chapter 4.1 Waste and Materials Management, v1.0, 2018, requirement 4.1.8.1: "At the present time, mine sites using riverine, submarine and lake disposal of mine waste materials will not be certified by IRMA." ↩
56. Skarn Associates, Gold water benchmarking: 21 m³ per ounce (2022), 278 mines. Conversion ours: 21 m³ × 32.15 oz/kg ≈ 675 m³/kg. Different system boundary from Mudd 2007. ↩
57. Alvarez-Pugliese, Machuca-Martínez & Pérez-Rincón, Water footprint in gold extraction: A case-study in Suárez, Cauca, Colombia, Heliyon 7(9), 2021: blue water footprint of 79.91 m³ per kg of gold; small and medium-scale mining. ↩
58. ICMM, Global Mining and Metals Water Dataset, 2026: more than 12,000 facilities in 148 countries; 65.7 % face at least one significant physical water risk. All commodities. ↩
59. First Environmental Court of Chile, Primer Tribunal Ambiental confirma clausura definitiva de Pascua Lama, September 17, 2020; Superintendencia del Medio Ambiente, Corte Suprema confirma las sanciones aplicadas por la SMA al proyecto Pascua Lama, 2022. ↩
60. Dethier et al., A global rise in alluvial mining increases sediment load in tropical rivers, Nature 620, 2023: 396 mining districts in 49 countries, 173 affected rivers; in 80 % of them, suspended sediment more than double pre-mining levels; about 35,000 km, or 6 % of all large tropical river reaches, altered. ↩
61. ICMM, Tool for Acid Rock Drainage and Metal Leaching Prevention and Management, 2025: "When waste material that contains sulphide minerals is not managed in the right way on mine sites, these natural chemical processes can accelerate, resulting in highly acidic water that can leach metals from the rock into the surrounding environment." ↩
62. International Network for Acid Prevention (INAP), Global Acid Rock Drainage Guide – Summary, 2009: "trace metals such as Cu, Pb, Zn, Cd, Mn, Co, and Ni can also achieve elevated concentrations", as can arsenic, selenium and antimony; neutral mine drainage "is characterized by elevated metals in solution at circumneutral pH"; "The ARD formation process can continue to produce impacted drainage for decades or centuries after mining has ceased." ↩
63. Kamunda, Mathuthu & Madhuku, Health Risk Assessment of Heavy Metals in Soils from Witwatersrand Gold Mining Basin, South Africa, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 13(1):138, 2016: "270 tailings dams and 380 mine residue dumps", "6 billion tonnes of pyrite tailings", "600,000 tonnes of low-grade uranium"; external hazard index 2.4, "higher than unity, posing a significant health risk". ↩
64. McCarthy, The impact of acid mine drainage in South Africa, South African Journal of Science 107(5/6), 2011: sulfate "typically around 3500 mg/L", pH "from 2 to 3"; "the problem is likely to persist for centuries rather than decades." ↩
65. US EPA Office of Inspector General, Nationwide Identification of Hardrock Mining Sites, Report 2004-P-00005, March 31, 2004: "The U.S. Forest Service estimates that approximately 10,000 miles of rivers and streams may have been contaminated by acid mine drainage." ↩
66. Ulrich, Trench & Hagemann, Gold mining greenhouse gas emissions, abatement measures, and the impact of a carbon price, Journal of Cleaner Production 340, 2022: weighted average of 726 kg CO₂e per ounce, Scope 1 and 2, 194 mines in 35 countries, 2018 data; individual mines from about 1,700 to 169,000 kg CO₂e per kg of gold. Conversion ours: 726 kg/oz × 32.15 oz/kg ≈ 23.3 t/kg. ↩
67. World Gold Council, Gold and climate change: Current and future impacts, 2019: 32,689 t CO₂e per tonne of gold, Scope 1 and 2, 2018 data. ↩
68. Skarn Associates, Emissions: gold and copper: total emissions of the gold industry of 50.5 Mt CO₂e in 2023 (Scope 1: 30.3 Mt, Scope 2: 20.2 Mt); South Africa accounts for 43 % of the gold sector's Scope 2 emissions with 4 % of production. ↩
69. US Environmental Protection Agency, Good Samaritan Program Update, April 2026. All hardrock commodities. ↩
70. CRC TiME, Towards an inventory of abandoned mines in Australia, Project 4.5 Final Report, 2022: "Australia has over 50,000 closed and abandoned mines, including quarries"; "Australian governments hold about $10 billion in environmental bonds; however, this may be insufficient to cover the rehabilitation liabilities of operating mines." All commodities. ↩
71. Auditor-General of South Africa, Media statement: Derelict and Ownerless Mines Performance Audit%20FINAL%20(002).pdf), March 31, 2022: 6,100 derelict and ownerless mines, including "2 322 other high-risk commodity mines such as gold, coal and copper", of which "none … have been rehabilitated"; Parliamentary Monitoring Group, Portfolio Committee on Mineral Resources and Energy, November 17, 2020: "The estimate of the quantum of costs for dealing with D&O mines was sitting at R49 billion." All commodities. ↩
72. US Environmental Protection Agency, Third Five-Year Review Report for Summitville Mine Superfund Site, September 2010: "costs of remedial actions implemented at the site by the federal government and the State of Colorado are in excess of $200 million." ↩
73. Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, Giant Mine Remediation Project ("approximately 237,000 tonnes of arsenic trioxide waste") and Project update, 2022: "The updated estimate for implementing the Giant Mine Remediation Project is approximately $4.38 billion." ↩
74. Harries, Woinarski, Rumpff, Gardener & Erskine, Characteristics and gaps in the assessment of progress in mine restoration, Restoration Ecology 32(1), 2024: 712 publications from 54 countries, 1970–2021. ↩
75. Moody's Ratings, reported in Mining.com, Top miners' reclamation obligations could surpass industry's total debt by 2033, September 23, 2024: asset retirement obligations of 24 large mining companies rose from about 40 billion US dollars in 2013 to 72 billion in 2023, around 42 % of their long-term debt. All commodities, not gold alone. ↩
76. ARENA, Kidston Pumped Hydro Energy Storage, updated October 2025: approximately 250 MW / 2,000 MWh, total cost around A$777 million, target completion December 1, 2026; Genex Power, 250MW Kidston Pumped Storage Hydro Project: "First pumped storage hydro project to utilise an abandoned gold mine". ↩
77. Samarco, The collapse: "On November 5, 2015, the Fundão dam, in the Germano Complex, in Mariana (MG), collapsed, causing 19 deaths." Iron ore. ↩
78. ICMM, Fifth anniversary of the dam collapse at Vale's Córrego do Feijão mine in Brumadinho, 2024. Iron ore. Reported death tolls vary between 270 and 272 across sources. ↩
79. World Gold Council, Gold Demand Trends Full Year 2014, 2015, table 6 (mine production 3,114.4 t, recycled gold 1,121.7 t, total supply 4,278.2 t); Gold Demand Trends Full Year 2023 – Supply, 2024 (3,644.4 t; 1,237.3 t; 4,898.8 t); Gold Demand Trends Full Year 2025 – Supply, 2026 (3,671.6 t; 1,404.3 t; 5,002.3 t). The council describes 2025 mine output as an all-time high and notes that recycling rose only 3 % despite a 44 % rise in the average gold price. It revises historical figures; 2014 is given as first published. ↩
80. Our own calculation from note 79: 3,671.6 t − 3,114.4 t = 557.2 t. Recycled share of total supply: 1,121.7 ÷ 4,278.2 = 26.2 % (2014); 1,404.3 ÷ 5,002.3 = 28.1 % (2025). Australia produced 284 t in 2024: US Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 – Gold, 2026. ↩
81. IUCN NL, Recycled but not responsible: loopholes in recycled gold from the Amazon, May 7, 2025. ↩
82. UNEP / Artisanal Gold Council, Reducing Mercury Use in Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining: A Practical Guide.pdf), 2012. ↩
83. Greenpeace Brasil, Gold Laundering in the Amazon: Anatomy of a Fraud, June 2026, p. 4: of 187 mining tenements analyzed in Pará, Mato Grosso and Rondônia, 98 garimpo permits with irregularities, through which 25.3 tonnes of gold had been declared by March 2026. The organization's own analysis. ↩
84. Alliance for Responsible Mining, Fairmined Standard for Gold from Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining, version 2.0, 2014: section 2.1 (alignment with the Minamata Convention; whole-ore amalgamation, open burning of amalgam, burning in residential areas and cyanide leaching of mercury-bearing tailings excluded, requirements 2.1.2, 2.1.5, 2.1.9, 2.1.14–2.1.16) and requirement 2.3.1 (Ecological Gold: no mercury and no cyanide, gravimetric processes only). ↩
85. Fairtrade International, Fairtrade Standard for Gold and Associated Precious Metals, version 1.2, in force until June 30, 2027: section 3.2 (management of mercury including retorts; exclusion of mining in protected areas, requirement 3.2.21; rehabilitation planned to occur within two years of the end of mining, requirement 3.2.30). A revised version 2.0 applies from July 1, 2027. ↩
86. Swiss Better Gold Association, Impact Report 2025, 2026, pp. 46–55 (criterion on climate change covering Scope 1 and 2 quantification, water efficiency and recirculation, soil conservation and mine restoration; all accredited producers have quantified their Scope 1 and 2 emissions; average water recirculation of 86 %, p. 51), Our approach (27 criteria) and Frequently Asked Questions, 2026 (Swiss Better Gold "is not a certification nor a standard"). ↩
87. Single Mine Origin, SMO Gold: "Every ounce of SMO Gold is traceable to a named source mine"; key segregation and chain of custody controls are "independently verified". ↩
88. IRMA, IRMA Standard for Responsible Mining and Independent Assessments, accessed September 2026. Gold appears in the directory only as a co-commodity at platinum group metal operations. ↩