Large-Scale Gold Mining (LSM) Explained

Industrial gold mining moves around three tonnes of rock for every gram of gold it produces – roughly 18 tonnes for a single wedding ring. It covers about a fifth of the world's mapped mining footprint, it is earning the widest margins in its history, and most of what it says about its own conduct is checked by nobody but itself.

Key Insights

• The ore grade drives everything else. Industrial gold mining works rock holding about one gram of gold per tonne. Across all gold mines worldwide, every gram of gold means moving around three tonnes of ore and waste rock – some 18 tonnes for an 8-gram wedding ring.
• This is an industry of multinationals operating far from home. The ten largest producers account for roughly a quarter of world output, and the largest alone booked 22.7 billion US dollars in revenue in 2025 – often in districts whose budgets are a rounding error beside it.
• Prosperity and harm arrive together. Research across around 800 mines in 44 developing countries finds household wealth rising near mines, alongside measurably more anemia in women and stunting in children.
• Most of the world's gold comes from weakly governed states. Of the thirteen countries the US Geological Survey names individually, only three score 50 or above on Transparency International's corruption index – and almost a third of world production is attributed to no country at all.
• Most assurance in large-scale gold mining is self-assurance. The World Gold Council does not verify its members' conformance, and as of September 2026 no primary gold mine has ever completed an assessment against IRMA – the one mining standard governed jointly with unions, NGOs and affected communities.

Table of Contents

• What large-scale gold mining is
• Large-scale gold mining by the numbers
• Where large-scale gold mining happens
• How industrial gold mining gets gold out of the ground
• From ore to doré – and where origin disappears
• Who mines the world's gold
• What large-scale gold mining costs the environment
• What it costs the people who live there
• Where large-scale and small-scale gold mining collide
• Where the money goes
• What gets left behind
• Three criticisms that miss large-scale mining
• Who is supposed to be checking
• What the industry can do, if it wants or is forced

What large-scale gold mining is

Large-scale gold mining is industrial mining of gold at volume, with heavy machinery and large amounts of capital. The usual shorthands are LSM and, where the metal needs naming, LSGM. Four features travel together in practice:

• Engineered extraction: an open pit worked by shovels and haul trucks, or a mechanized underground operation with shafts and declines.
• Very low ore grades: rock holding around one gram of gold per tonne, which only pays in enormous volumes.
• Industrial processing: grinding plants and cyanide circuits running tens of thousands of tonnes of ore a day.
• Corporate ownership: a company holding a state-issued concession and a mine plan spanning decades.

No standard sets a threshold where small becomes large. The OECD defines artisanal and small-scale mining as operations using "predominantly simplified forms of exploration, extraction, processing and transportation" that are "normally low capital intensive."¹ Industrial gold mining is its opposite, defined by capital and mechanization rather than by tonnage.

The two sectors split the world's gold between them. Large-scale gold mining produces roughly 80 % of it; artisanal and small-scale gold mining produces about a fifth with the overwhelming majority of the workforce.²

Large-scale gold mining by the numbers

The world's mines produced 3,671.6 tonnes of gold in 2025, more than in any year on record. Recycling added 1,404.3 tonnes, for a total supply of 5,002.3 tonnes.³ Industrial operations account for roughly four fifths of the mined share.²

Around one million people work in industrial gold mining worldwide⁴ – roughly 0.3 workers for every kilogram of gold produced, or about a hundred troy ounces a year per employee.

Those headcounts need reading carefully. Newmont reported about 17,500 employees at the end of 2025 – plus about 26,600 contractors.⁵ More people work at its mines under contract than on its payroll, and most peers publish no total at all.

Costs are at a record and margins more so. All-in sustaining costs reached 1,785 US dollars per ounce in the first quarter of 2026, the 28th consecutive year-on-year increase, while the margin over those costs hit 3,076 dollars per ounce, up 134 % in a year.⁶

Where large-scale gold mining happens

Five countries, two fifths of the gold

Production is spread across dozens of countries and concentrated in a handful. The US Geological Survey names thirteen of them. China led in 2025 with an estimated 380 tonnes, ahead of Russia at 310 and Australia at 280; the five largest together supplied just over 40 % of world output.⁷

Individual mines tell the same story more sharply. The three largest in 2025 were Nevada Gold Mines in the United States at 2,595 thousand ounces, Muruntau in Uzbekistan at 1,708, and Olimpiada in Russia at 1,357.⁸ Two sit in state-controlled or sanctions-affected hands.

Who governs the places gold comes from

The fourth column above is Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) for 2025, on a scale from 0 to 100. Only three of the thirteen countries score 50 or above: Australia, Canada and the United States. Transparency International's own summary is that 122 of 182 countries score under 50 and that "the vast majority of countries are failing to keep corruption under control."⁹

In tonnes: countries scoring under 50 supplied 1,610 tonnes in 2025, or 49 % of world production; countries scoring 50 or above supplied 640 tonnes, or 19 %.¹⁰

The remaining 30 % is the more revealing figure. The USGS attributes 1,000 tonnes – almost a third of world supply – to no country at all, filed under "other countries."⁷ That bucket includes Burkina Faso, Mali, Sudan, Tanzania, Papua New Guinea, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guinea, Zimbabwe and Colombia – every one of them below 50.

A second check points the same way. The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, which requires member states to publish what mining companies pay them, has around 55 implementing countries. None of the five largest gold producers is one.¹¹ Its 2025 progress report supplies the illustration: Cameroon reported exporting 22 kilograms of gold in 2023, while the United Arab Emirates recorded imports of more than 15 tonnes from Cameroon that year.¹¹

Sanctions add a layer. Russia produced 310 tonnes in 2024, nearly a tenth of world output. The London Bullion Market Association suspended all six Russian refiners in March 2022 and the G7 banned Russian gold imports from June 2022.¹² The metal did not leave the market, it changed address: Hong Kong's imports of Russian-origin gold rose from 3.3 tonnes in 2021 to 92.1 tonnes in 2025.¹³

Fifteen years from discovery to production

New supply also moves slowly: across 127 mines studied by S&P Global, the average interval from discovery to production was 15.7 years.¹⁴ A record gold price today will not produce a new mine before the 2040s, so the response shows up first as expansions at existing sites and pressure to reprocess old waste.

How industrial gold mining gets gold out of the ground

Open pit or underground

Two methods dominate, and which one a mine uses follows from the shape and depth of the ore body. Open-pit mining strips the overburden to reach broad, low-grade ore bodies and moves the largest volumes of any method; the pit widens as it deepens, so waste rock per tonne of ore rises over the life of the mine. Underground mining follows richer structures through shafts and declines, disturbs far less at the surface and exposes workers to far more risk.

The difference shows up in the ore. Industrial open pits process material averaging around 1.05 grams of gold per tonne; underground operations average closer to 3.25 grams.¹⁵ At the two largest producers, reserve grades at the end of 2025 averaged 0.94 and 0.98 grams per tonne.¹⁶

Why the grade explains everything else

Low grades mean moving mountains. Across all gold mines worldwide the rock-to-metal ratio – ore plus waste rock, divided by refined metal – is about 3,000,000 to 1. That is roughly three tonnes of ore and waste rock for every gram of gold, the highest ratio of the 25 commodities in the study that established the measure.¹⁷ Gold alone accounted for about 9.1 billion tonnes of the material moved by mining worldwide in the reference year.

Everything downstream scales with that number: diesel for haul trucks, electricity for grinding mills, water in the circuit, cyanide in the leach, and the tailings that have to be stored permanently.

And the grades keep falling. Gold head grades dropped 13.4 % between 2010 and 2023.¹⁸ Every fraction of a gram lost means more rock moved and more chemistry applied for the same gram of gold.

What a wedding ring moves

An 8-gram wedding ring in 18-karat gold contains 6 grams of fine gold. Two numbers follow, and they are not the same number.

Counting ore only, at the industrial open-pit average of 1.05 grams per tonne, the ring takes about 5.7 tonnes of ore – the rock that actually goes through the mill.¹⁹

Counting ore and waste rock together, at the global average of three tonnes per gram, the same ring takes about 18 tonnes.¹⁹ The difference is overburden and barren rock, moved to reach the ore and never processed.

Two ways to get the gold out of the rock

Milling crushes and grinds the ore fine, then leaches it with cyanide in tanks. Recovery is high, the process is contained, and the residue leaves as a wet slurry bound for a tailings facility.

Heap leaching stacks coarse ore on a lined pad and trickles cyanide solution through it. It is far cheaper and makes very low grades economic, which is why it spread. It also puts a large, chemically active pile of rock on an engineered liner. Two of the worst recent gold mining failures, at Çöpler in Türkiye and Eagle Gold in Yukon, were heap leach failures rather than dam breaks.

From ore to doré – and where origin disappears

The chemistry, and what it consumes

Industrial gold mining separates gold from rock with cyanide, which works on ore far too poor for anything else. How much is needed depends on the grade: operating data from Australian mines put average consumption around 150 kilograms of sodium cyanide per kilogram of gold, and below 2 grams per tonne above 1,000.²⁰ The same study reports about 477,000 liters of water and 146 gigajoules of energy per kilogram of gold.

The refinery, where origin ends

Mines do not ship finished metal. They ship doré, rough bars still carrying silver, copper and whatever else the ore contained. Refineries strip that away, usually to 999.9 fineness, and cast metal from many suppliers together.

That purity is what makes refined gold untraceable by analysis: gold at 999.9 is indistinguishable from any other gold at 999.9, whatever its origin. Origin is a documentation problem, not a chemistry problem, so it survives only where a chain of custody keeps batches physically separate and independently verified. That is the mechanism behind Single Mine Origin Gold, where every batch stays traceable to one named mine – and the reason recycled gold and freshly mined gold become physically the same product at the refinery gate.

Who mines the world's gold

Multinationals, headquartered a long way from the mine

Large-scale gold mining is the business of multinational corporations headquartered a long way from their mines – almost all of them in North America, Australia, the United Kingdom, South Africa, China, Russia or Uzbekistan. The ten largest producers together account for roughly a quarter of world output.²¹

The five largest, in 2025 figures:

• Newmont (United States): 5.89 million ounces of attributable gold, 22.7 billion US dollars in revenue, 7.1 billion in net income, 12 managed operations.⁵
• Agnico Eagle (Canada): 3.45 million ounces, 11.9 billion in revenue, 4.5 billion in net income.²²
• Barrick Mining (Canada, renamed from Barrick Gold in May 2025): 3.26 million ounces, 17.0 billion in revenue, 5.0 billion in net income, operations and projects in 17 countries.²³
• Navoi Mining and Metallurgical Company (Uzbekistan, state-owned): 3.15 million ounces, 10.8 billion in revenue, over 50,000 employees.²⁴
• AngloGold Ashanti (United Kingdom and South Africa): 3.1 million ounces, 9.7 billion in gold income, 38,243 employees, mines in eight countries.²⁵

Three of those five earned 16.5 billion US dollars in net income in a single year.²⁶

The asymmetry at the mine gate

Those numbers matter most where they meet their opposite. A company with revenue in the tens of billions negotiates land access, water use and compensation with district administrations, village associations and smallholder families whose annual budgets would not cover a week of the mine's operating costs. The imbalance shows above all in legal capacity: corporations arrive with permanent legal and community-relations departments and can litigate for years, while communities depend on whichever NGO takes up their case. Much of the record below exists only because one did.

Public pressure reaches some companies and not others

Large-scale gold mining is not one governance environment but two. Companies listed in the United States, Canada, Australia or the United Kingdom face disclosure rules, activist investors, journalists and courts that will hear a claim brought from abroad. That exposure is why several of the reforms described later happened at all.

State-owned and privately held producers in weaker jurisdictions face none of it. Navoi, fourth in the ranking, publishes financial statements but no social or environmental reporting. Its gold is no less real – there is simply nobody outside the company examining how it was produced.

What large-scale gold mining costs the environment

Land: gold is the second-largest footprint in mining

Mining covers roughly 100,000 square kilometers worldwide.²⁷ A 2026 study assigning that footprint to commodities found coal at 22.5 % and gold at 21.1 % – more than copper, iron, lithium and phosphate combined.²⁸ On our own arithmetic that is around 30,700 square kilometers, roughly the size of Belgium.

For a metal supplying about 3,700 tonnes a year, that is a striking share of the world's disturbed ground. Pits, waste rock dumps, tailings facilities, haul roads and plants all count toward it, and most of it stays converted long after production stops.

Tailings: the waste that has to be stored forever

Processing leaves vast volumes of fine, wet residue behind embankments that have to stand permanently. 366 tailings dam failures were recorded worldwide between 1915 and 2020, across all commodities, and the rate is rising again.²⁹

Gold's own cases run from the cyanide-bearing flood at Baia Mare in Romania in 2000, which reached the Danube and affected drinking water for over two million people,³⁰ to the Çöpler heap leach collapse in Türkiye in February 2024, which killed nine miners,³¹ and the Eagle Gold failure in Yukon four months later.³² The worst recent tailings disaster was not gold at all: the 2019 collapse at Brumadinho in Brazil, an iron ore operation, killed 272 people.³³ We go through this record in detail in our overview of gold's environmental impact.

Climate: small in total, extreme per kilogram

Large-scale gold mining emits more than 100 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent a year. Across 194 mines in 35 countries the weighted average is roughly 23 tonnes per kilogram of gold, with a range between countries of more than twentyfold.³⁴ In absolute terms gold is a small emitter; per kilogram of product it is one of the most intensive materials in industrial use.

What it costs the people who live there

Wealth and health move in opposite directions

The honest finding is uncomfortable for both sides of the argument. A study covering around 800 mines in 44 developing countries found gains in asset wealth of 0.3 standard deviations near mines, coexisting with 10 percentage points more anemia among women and 5 percentage points more stunting in young children, which the authors trace to heavy metal pollution.³⁵

World Bank research in Ghana, Mali and Tanzania points the same way: households near mines in Mali were 30 percentage points more likely to have a floor other than earth, and in Tanzania stunting near mines rose by 12.3 percentage points.³⁶

Anyone claiming industrial gold mining simply makes local people poorer is wrong. The trade-off is the finding: prosperity and harm, in the same place, at the same time.

When the concession includes your village

Resettlement is routine when a large mine is built, and the most consequential thing that happens to people living on a deposit. At Ahafo in Ghana, Newmont resettled about 2,200 people into two new villages and built 400 houses, issuing formal land titles for the first time – while conceding disputes over crop compensation and a shortage of jobs for young people.³⁷

How often this happens is badly documented. Researchers found around 44 % of the mines in their sample associated with resettlement during operation, often more than once at the same site, and no global survey measuring the total.³⁸

Violence by security forces

Some of the most serious allegations against large gold mines concern the people guarding them. At Porgera in Papua New Guinea, Human Rights Watch investigated six alleged gang rapes by members of the mine's security department between 2008 and 2010.³⁹ At North Mara in Tanzania, the organization RAID documents at least 77 people killed and 304 injured by the police unit responsible for mine security since 2006; Barrick disputes the account and notes that it does not control the police force.⁴⁰ In March 2024 it settled a UK High Court claim brought by 14 Tanzanian claimants, without admitting liability.⁴¹

In July 2026 the dispute reached the certification system itself. Thirty claimants joined a claim against the London Bullion Market Association over its Good Delivery certification of gold from North Mara, arguing it had "effectively greenwashed these systemic human rights abuses." The claim was pending as of September 2026.⁴² Anyone relying on a refiner's responsible sourcing status should follow it. More on these patterns in our overview of gold's social impact.

Occupational disease: the largest documented harm in gold

Underground gold mining made large numbers of men permanently ill. Decades of silica dust in South Africa's deep mines left former workers with silicosis and tuberculosis on a scale with no parallel elsewhere in the sector: roughly 500,000 people are potentially eligible for compensation under the settlement that eventually followed.

It took a class action to get anything paid. Six companies established the Tshiamiso Trust with around 5 billion rand over 13 years, after the Johannesburg High Court confirmed the settlement in July 2019.⁴³ By February 2026 about 23,000 claims had been processed and around 2.5 billion rand paid out – decades after the exposure, and only because the miners went to court.⁴⁴

Day-to-day safety has improved, on the industry's own numbers. Across ICMM member companies the total recordable injury frequency rate – injuries per million hours worked, counting employees and contractors – fell from 5.07 in 2012 to 2.21 in 2025. Fatalities have not followed: 39 in 2025, across the 26 member companies that report.

Those figures deserve a caveat: they are self-reported, cover all commodities rather than gold alone, carry no independent assurance of the aggregate, and come from members accounting for about a third of the industry by size.⁴⁵ Across mining as a whole, the International Labour Organization estimates the sector accounts for about 1 % of the global workforce and around 8 % of fatal workplace accidents.⁴⁶

Where large-scale and small-scale gold mining collide

Most small-scale mining happens nowhere near an industrial gold mine. Where the two meet, the conflict is structural, and the World Gold Council's own review of 25 case studies concedes it: "many LSM companies have relied on security interventions to manage their interfaces with ASGM."⁴⁷

The root is a clash of two legal logics. Industrial operators derive their right from a state concession, on the assumption that subsurface minerals belong to the state. Small-scale miners rely on customary claims or surface ownership. Formally the concession wins; historically the community was usually there first. In many countries the law offers small-scale miners no status at all, which is how informality is manufactured.

Two recent cases show what that produces. In January 2025 Ghanaian soldiers shot small-scale miners on the AngloGold Ashanti concession at Obuasi; official accounts put the death toll at seven to eight, the miners' national association at nine.⁴⁸ At Kibali in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, field researchers counted around 5,500 diggers inside the concession and repeated clearance attempts since 2014 using excessive force.⁴⁹ We compare both sectors directly in artisanal versus large-scale gold mining.

Where the money goes

Large-scale gold mining pays large sums into the countries where it operates. In 2024 the 28 member companies of the World Gold Council contributed 66.4 billion US dollars to their host economies: 43.6 billion to in-country suppliers, 12.4 billion in wages, 10.4 billion in taxes and royalties, and 740.9 million to local communities.⁵⁰

That community figure is 1.1 % of the total.⁵¹ It is also self-reported and unverified.

How much of the rest reaches people depends on governance, and the sector has a poor record there. In the OECD's analysis of 427 transnational bribery cases concluded between 1999 and 2014, the extractive sector – oil, gas and mining together – accounted for 19 %, the largest share of any sector.⁵² Concessions are awarded by states, and that is the mechanism by which ground changes hands.

None of which makes gold an automatic curse. Research in Mali found that gold price booms raised household spending and reduced poverty around mining areas, with the stronger effect around artisanal rather than industrial operations.⁵³

What gets left behind

Closing a mine properly means treating the water, stabilizing the waste, removing infrastructure and restoring the land – expensive work, all of it due at the moment the revenue stops. Many operations never get there.

The documented backlog runs to more than 100,000 abandoned hardrock mine sites in the United States, with cleanup costs estimated at 50 billion US dollars or more;⁵⁴ and around 6,000 derelict and ownerless mines in South Africa, with a rehabilitation bill of 49 billion rand against an annual budget of about 120 million.⁵⁵ At that rate the South African backlog would take roughly 400 years to clear.⁵⁶

Those are two of the few countries that count. Most producing countries have never made an inventory, so the real number is unknown and certainly larger.

Whether rehabilitation works is an open question. A review of 712 publications from 54 countries, covering five decades of restoration research, reports no systematic success rate: most assessments substitute space for time rather than re-measuring the same sites.⁵⁷ The liability is at least being booked: asset retirement obligations across 24 large miners grew from 40 billion US dollars in 2013 to 72 billion in 2023, about 42 % of the sector's long-term debt.⁵⁸

Three criticisms that miss large-scale mining

A great deal of what circulates as criticism of "gold mining" describes the artisanal half of the sector rather than the industrial one. Three come up constantly.

• Mercury. Artisanal gold mining is the world's largest man-made source, at around 37 % of roughly 2,200 tonnes emitted to air each year.⁵⁹ Industrial operations do not use mercury to recover gold – their chemistry is cyanide.⁶⁰
• Child labor. The documented cases in gold come from the artisanal sector. Human Rights Watch's field research on children in Tanzanian gold mining deals exclusively with small-scale operations.⁶¹
• Smuggling and illicit gold flows. The most thorough recent study across eight African countries states explicitly that it covers artisanal and small-scale mining only.⁶²

The same applies to the two most-cited tailings disasters, Brumadinho and Mariana. Both were iron ore.

Who is supposed to be checking

Several systems claim to govern responsible practice in large-scale gold mining. What separates them is who writes the rules and who may see the result.

IRMA is the only one with balanced governance: two board seats each for mining companies, purchasers, NGOs, affected communities, organized labor and finance, with a veto so no bloc can be outvoted. Its standard carries more than 420 auditable requirements and full audit reports are published.⁶³ As of September 2026, no primary gold mine has ever completed an IRMA assessment. Gold appears in the directory only as a co-commodity at platinum group metal operations, all still in process.

The Responsible Gold Mining Principles of the World Gold Council set out 10 principles and 51 provisions, and conformance is a condition of membership. The council also states that it "does not verify or evaluate a company's conformance with the Responsible Gold Mining Principles."⁶⁴ There is no public register of which members conform. One member's 2025 report shows how much the word covers: full conformance with 20 of 51 provisions and partial conformance with 31.⁶⁵

The ICMM Mining Principles require self-assessment at all covered sites plus third-party validation – but the company selects which sites are validated, and the procedure states that "there is no overall outcome for a given asset."⁶⁶ ICMM and the World Gold Council are now merging their schemes with two others into a single Consolidated Mining Standard, unpublished as of September 2026.⁶⁷

Two narrower instruments work better precisely because they are narrow. The International Cyanide Management Code covers cyanide handling only, but it is independently audited every three years, results are published, and other systems require it. More than 100 industrial gold mines are certified.⁶⁸

The Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management binds ICMM members: as of August 2025, 67 % of their 836 tailings facilities were in full conformance and the deadline for the remainder had been missed.⁶⁹ The Responsible Jewellery Council's Code of Practices covers mining in 14 provisions, but publishes no audit reports.⁷⁰

There is a precedent for what happens when an industry writes its own definition. Since 2003 the Kimberley Process has certified rough diamonds against a definition covering only stones that finance rebel movements, which leaves abuses by state forces outside it. Global Witness left in 2011, calling the scheme "an accomplice to diamond laundering"; IMPACT followed in 2017.⁷¹ A proposal to widen the definition failed again in November 2025.⁷² Twenty-three years on, it is unchanged.

The pattern across all of them is the same. Where an outside party with no commercial stake does the checking and publishes the result, the system means something. Where the industry sets the rule, selects the sample and declares the outcome, "responsibly sourced" is a claim rather than a finding.

What the industry can do, if it wants or is forced

Pressure has worked before

Every meaningful safety rule in large-scale gold mining followed a disaster and the public reaction to it. The International Cyanide Management Code grew out of Baia Mare, the Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management out of Brumadinho. South Africa's Mine Health and Safety Act followed the Vaal Reefs shaft accident of 1995, in which 104 miners died.⁷³ Federal charges were laid over the 2014 Mount Polley tailings breach a decade later.⁷⁴

None of that happened because the industry decided to. It happened because people kept watching, documenting and litigating. Watching the large companies is worth the effort, because the listed ones respond to it.

What scale makes possible

Capital is the industry's real advantage, and some of it is being used well. At Bellevue in Western Australia, an off-grid mine runs on a hybrid microgrid of roughly 27 megawatts of solar, 24 of wind and a 15 megawatt battery, built and operated by an energy contractor together with the Traditional Owners' company.⁷⁵ At Tropicana, also in Western Australia, a comparable hybrid plant cut diesel for power generation by 96 %.⁷⁶

What is missing is not technology but the decision to spend on it. With margins over all-in sustaining costs at a record 3,076 US dollars per ounce and three companies alone booking 16.5 billion US dollars of net income in 2025, large-scale gold mining is better placed to fund proper closure, water treatment and community agreements than at any point in its history. We go through what good practice looks like in our article on responsible large-scale gold mining.

Key takeaways

• Gold is the second-largest land user in global mining. Around 21 % of the world's mapped mining footprint is gold, just behind coal at 22.5 % and ahead of every other metal – for a metal that supplies 3,700 tonnes a year.
• This is an industry of multinationals operating far from home. Ten companies produce about a quarter of the world's gold, and they negotiate with district administrations and village associations whose resources are not comparable.
• Prosperity and harm arrive together. Near industrial mines, asset wealth rises and so do anemia in women and stunting in children. Both belong in any serious account of what a mine does to the place it sits in.
• Most assurance in gold is self-assurance. The industry's own association does not verify conformance, companies select which of their sites get validated, and the one standard governed jointly with unions and communities has never assessed a gold mine.
• The money to fix this exists today. Record margins, record profits – and a rehabilitation backlog of hundreds of thousands of abandoned sites that nobody has funded. What is missing is the requirement to spend it, and buyers willing to ask.

What to do next

Gold will keep being mined for as long as it has value. The one question that changes anything is the one almost nobody asks a supplier: which mine did this come from, and can you show me the documentation? If you want gold where that question has an answer, take a look at our Single Mine Origin gold bars – or ask us what would fit your production.

Further reading

• The overview that sits above both halves of the industry: gold mining explained.
• The small-scale side in depth, and why it carries most of the sector's employment: artisanal and small-scale gold mining.
• What traceable sourcing from a named industrial mine actually involves: Single Mine Origin Gold.

Sources

1. OECD, Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible Supply Chains of Minerals from Conflict-Affected and High-Risk Areas, 3rd edition, 2016, definitions. ↩
2. planetGOLD, The planetGOLD programme and the large-scale gold mining sector (large-scale mining approximately 80 % of global gold production); World Gold Council, Artisanal and small-scale gold mining: a vital source of gold supply, August 26, 2026 (around one fifth of annual gold production). ↩
3. World Gold Council / Metals Focus, Gold Demand Trends Full Year 2025 – Supply, January 2026. The council notes that production volumes are subject to revision. ↩
4. World Gold Council, Gold mining industry contributed over US$171 billion to global economy, June 2, 2015 (2013 data, 47 producing countries): "gold mining companies directly employed over one million people." ↩
5. Newmont Corporation, Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025, 2026: sales of 22,669 million US dollars; net income attributable to Newmont stockholders of 7,085 million; "approximately 17,500 people were employed by Newmont and Newmont subsidiaries, and approximately 26,600 people were working as contractors." ↩
6. Oliver Blagden / Metals Focus for the World Gold Council, Record gold prices outpace rising mining costs in Q1'26, August 24, 2026: "global average gold producer All-In Sustaining Costs (AISC) rose by 5% q/q and 16% y/y to US$1,785/oz in Q1'26"; "average AISC margins rose by 25% q/q and 134% y/y to a record US$3,076/oz." ↩
7. U.S. Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 – Gold, 2026, using the 2025 estimate column. Two things to know about this table. First, the USGS world total differs from the World Gold Council figure in note 3 because the two use different methodologies. Second, the thirteen country estimates are each rounded independently and add up to 3,250 tonnes, 50 tonnes below the world total of 3,300 that the USGS itself states; the shares in the third column are calculated against 3,300 and therefore sum to about 98 % rather than 100 %. The USGS states that China, Russia, Australia, Canada and the United States "together accounted for 41% of estimated global production in 2025." ↩
8. Mining.com, Ranked: World's top 20 largest gold mines, March 25, 2026, updated May 12, 2026, based on S&P Global data. Nevada Gold Mines is a joint venture, 61.5 % Barrick and 38.5 % Newmont. ↩
9. Transparency International, Corruption Perceptions Index 2025, published February 10, 2026. Scale from 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean), 182 countries and territories, 13 underlying data sources. Global average 42. "The vast majority of countries are failing to keep corruption under control: 122 out of 182 score under 50 in the index." ↩
10. Our own calculation from the production estimates in note 7 and the Corruption Perceptions Index 2025, using the USGS 2025 estimate column. Under 50: China 380 + Russia 310 + Ghana 150 + Mexico 140 + Kazakhstan 130 + Uzbekistan 130 + Peru 110 + Indonesia 90 + South Africa 90 + Brazil 80 = 1,610 tonnes, or 48.8 % of 3,300. Score 50 or above: Australia 280 + Canada 200 + United States 160 = 640 tonnes, or 19.4 %. Because the country estimates are rounded, the two shares and the unattributed 30.3 % add up to about 98 % rather than 100 %. This is our own combination of two public datasets, not a published statistic. ↩
11. Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, Countries, accessed September 2026 (around 55 implementing countries; China, Russia, Australia, Canada and the United States are not among them – the United States withdrew in November 2017); EITI, EITI Progress Report 2025, April 2026: "While Cameroon reported exporting just 22 kilograms of gold in 2023, the United Arab Emirates alone recorded imports of more than 15 tonnes from Cameroon in the same year." ↩
12. London Bullion Market Association, Russian Good Delivery bars update: all six Russian refiners suspended with effect from March 7, 2022; bars already in the London and Swiss markets before that date remain Good Delivery. US Department of the Treasury, press release, June 28, 2022, on the G7 import ban announced June 26, 2022; the EU prohibition followed on July 22, 2022 and the Swiss one on August 4, 2022. ↩
13. Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department trade data, as analysed by BullionVault, Gold: Russia, China, September 7, 2026. Hong Kong imports of Russian-origin gold: 3.3 tonnes in 2021, a record 92.1 tonnes in 2025. ↩
14. S&P Global Market Intelligence, Discovery to production averages 15.7 years for 127 mines. The analysis covers mining across commodities, not gold alone. ↩
15. 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. ↩
16. Newmont, 2025 Mineral Reserves, February 19, 2026 (118.2 million ounces in 3,907 million tonnes of ore, equal to 0.94 g/t); Barrick Mining, Mineral Reserves and Resources, 2026 (85 million attributable ounces in 2,700 million tonnes, equal to 0.98 g/t). Grade conversions are ours. The two companies use different gold price assumptions, so the figures are not strictly comparable. ↩
17. Nassar, Lederer, Brainard, Padilla & Lessard, Rock-to-Metal Ratio: A Foundational Metric for Understanding Mine Wastes, Environmental Science & Technology 56(10), 2022, open access. Main text: ratios run "from 3 for Si to 3 × 10⁶ for gold," and gold accounts for "approximately 9.1 billion metric tons" of material moved. The ratio is defined as ore plus overburden and barren rock divided by refined metal; gold produced as a by-product is allocated by revenue share. Reference year 2018, 777 operations covering about 79 % of world production. The paper's abstract gives a range of 10⁵ to 10⁶ for precious metals as a group; the global figure for gold specifically is 3 × 10⁶. The accompanying USGS release states it as "for every three metric tons of ore and waste rock moved and processed, only one gram of gold is produced." ↩
18. 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." ↩
19. Our own calculation. An 8-gram ring in 750 alloy (18 karat) contains 6 grams of fine gold. Ore only: 6 g ÷ 1.05 g/t = 5.71 tonnes, using the open-pit average grade in note 15 and assuming full recovery, so the real figure is somewhat higher. Ore and waste rock: 6 g × 3 t/g = 18 tonnes, using the global rock-to-metal ratio in note 17. The two figures use different system boundaries and must not be compared with each other as though they measured the same thing. ↩
20. Mudd, Resource Consumption Intensity and the Sustainability of Gold Mining, 2007, based on operating data from Australian mines 1995–2006. Water "about 1.15 kL/t ore or about 477 kL/kg Au"; energy "about 0.35 GJ/t ore or about 146 GJ/kg Au"; cyanide below 100 kg/kg Au above 6 g/t and above 1,000 kg/kg Au below 2 g/t. ↩
21. Our own calculation from the 2025 results of the ten largest producers (Newmont, Agnico Eagle, Barrick Mining, Navoi MMC, AngloGold Ashanti, Zijin Mining, Polyus, Gold Fields, Kinross, Northern Star), totalling approximately 941 tonnes against world mine production of 3,671.6 tonnes in note 3, or 25.6 %. Two caveats: Gold Fields and Kinross report gold-equivalent ounces, and Northern Star reports a financial year ending in June. The order of magnitude holds; the decimal does not. ↩
22. Agnico Eagle Mines, 2025 Annual Report, 2026: revenues from mining operations of 11,907.9 million US dollars, net income of 4,461.5 million, payable gold production of 3,447,367 ounces. The company does not publish a total headcount. ↩
23. Barrick Mining Corporation, Annual Report 2025, 2026: revenues of 16,956 million US dollars, net earnings attributable to equity holders of 4,993 million, attributable gold production of 3,255 thousand ounces; 2025 Sustainability Report: operations and projects in 17 countries. The name change from Barrick Gold Corporation took effect on May 9, 2025. The company does not publish a total headcount. ↩
24. Navoi Mining and Metallurgical Company, FY 2025 IFRS Financial Statements, March 2026. ↩
25. AngloGold Ashanti, Corporate Profile, 2026 (38,243 employees including contractors, average for the year to December 31, 2025; mines in eight countries) and the company's full-year 2025 earnings release (gold income of 9,730 million US dollars, production of 3.1 million ounces). ↩
26. Our own addition of the net income figures in notes 5, 22 and 23: 7,085 + 4,993 + 4,461.5 = 16,539.5 million US dollars. ↩
27. Maus, Giljum, da Silva et al., An update on global mining land use, Scientific Data 9:433, 2022: 101,583 km² across 145 countries, based on 2019 satellite imagery. ↩
28. Maus et al., A data-driven approach to mapping global commodity-specific mining land-use, Journal of Cleaner Production 540:147437, 2026. The paper reports coal and gold as the two dominant commodities in global mining land footprints, at 22.5 % and 21.1 % respectively, and states: "Of the total 145,738.1 km² of mine land, 106,733.4 km² (73.2%) could be assigned to at least one primary commodity." The polygons derive from a 2019 image mosaic, so the mapping base is 2019 even though publication is 2026. The figure of approximately 30,700 km² for gold is our own calculation (21.1 % of 145,738.1 km²) and does not appear in the paper. ↩
29. Islam & Murakami, Global-scale impact analysis of mine tailings dam failures: 1915–2020, Global Environmental Change 70:102361, 2021. Figures cover mining across all commodities. ↩
30. UNEP / OCHA, Cyanide Spill at Baia Mare, Romania – Assessment Mission Report, March 2000. The operator was Aurul, a joint venture of Esmeralda Exploration and the Romanian state. ↩
31. SSR Mining, 2024 Çöpler Incident; Dave Petley, The Çöpler mine landslide in Turkey, American Geophysical Union, 2024. ↩
32. Government of Yukon, Victoria Gold Corporation's Eagle mine heap leach failure, 2024–2025. ↩
33. ICMM, Fifth anniversary of the dam collapse at Vale's Córrego do Feijão mine in Brumadinho, 2024. Reported death tolls vary between 267 and 272 across sources. ↩
34. Ulrich, Trench & Hagemann, Gold mining greenhouse gas emissions, abatement measures, and the impact of a carbon price, Journal of Cleaner Production 340, 2022. Scope 1 and 2, 194 mines in 35 countries, 2018 data. The conversion to tonnes per kilogram is ours (726 kg/oz × 32.1507 oz/kg ≈ 23.3 t/kg). ↩
35. von der Goltz & Barnwal, Mines: The local wealth and health effects of mineral mining in developing countries, Journal of Development Economics 139, 2019. Covers mineral mining across commodities, not gold alone. ↩
36. Chuhan-Pole, Dabalen & Land, Mining in Africa: Are Local Communities Better Off?, World Bank, 2017. ↩
37. ICMM, Managing the impacts of resettlement: Ahafo, case study with Newmont figures. ↩
38. Owen & Kemp, Mining-induced displacement and resettlement: a critical appraisal, Journal of Cleaner Production, 2015. ↩
39. Human Rights Watch, Gold's Costly Dividend: Human Rights Impacts of Papua New Guinea's Porgera Gold Mine, February 1, 2011, based on 92 interviews. ↩
40. RAID, Barrick's Tanzania gold mine, one of the deadliest in Africa, investigation April to October 2022, based on more than 178 interviews; Barrick, North Mara: response to allegations. ↩
41. RAID, Barrick subsidiaries settle UK court case alleging deaths and injuries at North Mara, March 27, 2024. ↩
42. Leigh Day, New allegations of killing and torture by security forces at African gold mine as 30 people join legal claim against the London Bullion Market Association, July 9, 2026. The allegations have not been tested in court. ↩
43. AngloGold Ashanti, South African silicosis and TB class action settlement, 2019. The six respondent companies are African Rainbow Minerals, Anglo American South Africa, AngloGold Ashanti, Gold Fields, Harmony and Sibanye-Stillwater. ↩
44. Fidelis Hove, South Africa: Gold Mining's Long Shadow, Daily Maverick via allAfrica, September 3, 2026. ↩
45. ICMM, ICMM reports 2025 safety performance of members, July 30, 2026, and the accompanying benchmarking report. 26 reporting member companies across all commodities; 2,804,077,602 hours worked in 2025. Rates are per million hours worked and cover employees and contractors. ICMM states that its members "represent approximately one third of the global mining and metals industry." Members are required to report their safety performance in their own annual reporting; ICMM publishes no independent assurance statement for the aggregate. ↩
46. International Labour Organization, Mining: a hazardous work: mining accounts for "only ... one percent of the global workforce" but "about eight percent of fatal accidents at work." All commodities. ↩
47. World Gold Council, Lessons learned on managing the interface between large-scale and artisanal and small-scale gold mining, March 2022, 25 case studies from 18 countries. ↩
48. Dubawa Ghana, Obuasi shooting: all the details about the killing of miners by Ghana's military, 2025. Accounts of the death toll differ between the Ghana Armed Forces, the government and the Ghana National Association of Small Scale Miners. ↩
49. IPIS and PAX, Mapping artisanal mining sites in the Kibali gold mine concession, December 8, 2025. ↩
50. World Gold Council, The Social and Economic Contribution of Gold Mining, 2024 data, published 2025. Self-reported by member companies. ↩
51. Our own calculation: 740.9 million divided by 66.4 billion US dollars equals 1.12 %. ↩
52. OECD, OECD Foreign Bribery Report: An Analysis of the Crime of Bribery of Foreign Public Officials, December 2, 2014: 427 cases concluded between February 1999 and June 2014. "Almost two-thirds of cases occurred in only four sectors: extractive (19%); construction (15%); transportation and storage (15%); and information and communication (10%)." The extractive category covers oil, gas and mining together, not mining alone. ↩
53. Coulibaly, Foltz, Parker, Olurotimi & Traoré, The effects of mining on local poverty in developing countries: Evidence from Mali, World Development 180, 2024. ↩
54. US Environmental Protection Agency, Good Samaritan Program Update, April 2026; US Government Accountability Office, Abandoned Hardrock Mines, GAO-20-238, March 5, 2020 (140,000 features identified on federal land, an estimated 390,000 more not yet captured). All commodities. ↩
55. Mail & Guardian, R49bn to rehabilitate 6,000 mines, December 6, 2019, reporting a briefing by the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy to a parliamentary committee on November 20, 2019. All commodities. ↩
56. Our own calculation: 49 billion rand divided by 120 million rand per year equals approximately 408 years, before inflation and before any new sites are added. ↩
57. 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. ↩
58. Moody's Ratings, reported in Mining.com, Top miners' reclamation obligations could surpass industry's total debt by 2033, September 23, 2024. Covers 24 large mining companies across all commodities. ↩
59. UNEP Global Mercury Partnership, Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining (ASGM), citing the Global Mercury Assessment 2018. ↩
60. UN Environment Programme, Global Mercury Assessment 2018, 2019, emissions to air for the 2015 inventory year: artisanal and small-scale gold mining 838 tonnes (37.7 %), large-scale gold production 84.5 tonnes (3.8 %), total anthropogenic emissions 2,220 tonnes. On the mechanism in industrial operations see US EPA, Gold Mine Ore Processing and Production NESHAP, promulgated February 17, 2011, which regulates mercury from roasting, autoclaves, carbon kilns, electrowinning and retorts. ↩
61. Human Rights Watch, Toxic Toil: Child Labor and Mercury Exposure in Tanzania's Small-Scale Gold Mines, August 28, 2013. ↩
62. Pellerin & Ummel, Illicit Gold Flows and Tax Evasion in Eight ATI Partner Countries, International Tax Compact / GIZ, September 2025. ↩
63. IRMA, IRMA Standard for Responsible Mining, Governance, Independent Assessments and Mining Engagement, all accessed September 2026. The directory of completed assessments covers iron, graphite, lithium, titanium and other commodities; gold appears only as a co-commodity at platinum group metal operations, none of which has a completed assessment. ↩
64. World Gold Council, Responsible Gold Mining Principles, accessed September 2026: "The World Gold Council does not verify or evaluate a company's conformance with the Responsible Gold Mining Principles or the work of any assurance provider." ↩
65. Equinox Gold, 2025 Report on the Implementation of the Responsible Gold Mining Principles, May 21, 2026. Assurance was provided at the limited assurance level under ISAE 3000 (Revised). We cite this report because the company published its conformance breakdown, which most members do not. ↩
66. ICMM, Assurance and Validation Procedure, accessed September 2026. ↩
67. Consolidated Mining Standard Initiative, News & Media and FAQs, accessed September 2026. The initiative expects finalisation in 2026 and anticipates coverage of almost 100 mining companies across approximately 600 facilities in around 60 countries. ↩
68. International Cyanide Management Institute, Frequently Asked Questions and Global Recognition, accessed September 2026: "over 100 industrial mines are certified in compliance with the Cyanide Code, and collectively those operations account for more than half of the world's gold produced by commercial industrial primary gold mines." The institute also notes that as a voluntary program it "cannot impose penalties" beyond decertification. IRMA, Standard chapter 4.7 Cyanide, 2018, requirement 4.7.1.1, makes certification mandatory for eligible operations. ↩
69. 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." ↩
70. Responsible Jewellery Council, Code of Practices, 2024 edition, in force since January 1, 2025. Mining-specific provisions are COP 32 to 45. ↩
71. Global Witness, Global Witness leaves Kimberley Process, December 2, 2011; IMPACT, "Consumers are Being Sold Something That's Not Real", December 14, 2017. The Kimberley Process defines conflict diamonds as rough diamonds "used illegally by rebel or insurgent groups … to undermine or threaten legitimate governments," which excludes abuses by state forces. ↩
72. Rapaport, Kimberley Process Fails to Expand Conflict-Diamond Definition, November 23, 2025, on the Dubai plenary. The World Diamond Council had proposed extending the definition to violence by militias, mercenaries and organised criminal networks; no consensus was reached. ↩
73. Minerals Council South Africa, We remember Vaal Reefs, on the accident of May 10, 1995 and the Mine Health and Safety Act 29 of 1996 that followed. ↩
74. Mining.com, Ten years after Mount Polley dam breach, 15 charges laid, December 2024. Mount Polley is a copper-gold operation. ↩
75. Zenith Energy, Bellevue Gold, on the hybrid microgrid in commercial operation since May 2024, delivered with Tjiwarl Contracting Services through the Tjiwarl Katu Power joint venture; RenewEconomy, Remote gold mine sources 88 pct of its power needs in last quarter from wind, solar and battery, January 20, 2026 (87.8 % over the quarter); pv magazine, Off-grid mine goes 155 consecutive hours on 100 % renewable energy, June 22, 2026. Capacity figures differ slightly between the operator and later reporting; they are given here rounded. The company also claims net zero Scope 1 and 2 emissions for 2025, achieved partly through purchased offsets; we do not rely on that claim here. ↩
76. Mining Weekly, AngloGold completes Australia's largest hybrid power system at Tropicana, March 31, 2025. Company figures; AngloGold Ashanti's own site states the system's capacity differently, so the capacity figures should be read as approximate. ↩