For a small, rural town in the central Philippines, Paracale has a lot of pawn shops. That’s because the ground underneath it has a lot of gold. There is so much that a decade ago local officials had to tell people to stop digging under their houses to stop them collapsing, says Shirley Suzara, vice-president of a local mining association.
But the precious metal comes at a cost. “Way back we started noticing these mysterious illnesses – in our lungs, some kind of poisoning,” says Suzara, gesturing to her chest. “But we couldn’t work out where it was coming from.”
At small goldmines across the Philippines and around the world, mercury is used to remove the precious metal from its ore, poisoning the miners and environment around them. It was only after an environmental organisation, Ban Toxics, visited Paracale in 2010 and found more mercury in the air than its detector could measure that the illnesses lost their mystery.
“We connected the dots,” says Suzara, from the Association of Miners in Casalugan barangay, or village. “It was a terrifying experience.”
The realisation was too late for Suzara’s cousin, a miner in his 40s, who died of lung disease in October 2023, leaving his wife and nine children, after a year in and out of hospital with splitting headaches.
Despite the Philippines government banning the use of mercury in small goldmines in 2012, it remains widespread. But a United Nations programme called PlanetGold has selected Paracale as one of a number of sites to trial a new technique of extracting gold from ore without using mercury.
With about 15 million people estimated to work in small-scale goldmines, it is a model that PlanetGold wants to replicate around the world.
The Philippines was one of eight countries first selected for trialling the programme in 2019 and in the past year, PlanetGold has begun expanding it to another 15 countries. It hopes the new processing system could provide an example for other goldmining regions – from Mongolia to Madre de Dios in the Peruvian Amazon.
In conventional processing, mercury is mixed with crushed gold ore, where it sticks to particles of the precious metal and forms shiny globs of a mercury-gold amalgam. That mixture is then heated to separate the metals, leaving gold for refining.
But the process puts mercury fumes into the air and it leaches into watercourses, where it bioaccumulates in fish and other organisms.
Studies have shown exposure to even a small amount of mercury can attack the central nervous system and cause serious harm: from hair loss, tremors and impaired vision in the short term, to lung disease, paralysis and birth defects after chronic exposure.
Instead of a chemical process, PlanetGold uses physics to shake heavy gold particles free, using a centrifugal concentrator and then spun in a large helicoidal cone.
After months of testing, PlanetGold says the plant can now recover roughly as much gold for every tonne of ore as by processing with mercury.
The equipment at Paracale and at another site in Sagada in the northern Philippines will be transferred to the ownership of local mining associations in 2025, but for other communities across the country, the miners will have to raise the money to construct it themselves. The equipment is not cheap, and has so far only been operated with engineers on hand.
While the Philippine government’s Mines and Geosciences Bureau (MGB) and PlanetGold spent more than 32m Philippine pesos (£429,000) building the plant in Paracale and training locals to use it, they insist miners could earn that much back in three years from not having to regularly buy mercury.
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For mining communities where most people earn less than the minimum wage, however, the equipment represents an insurmountable expense with no outside investment. That in turn is hard to solicit while most mines still operate illegally, says Sarah Marie Pante-Aviado, an information officer with the provincial government of Camarines Norte, which includes Paracale.
Pante-Aviado grew up next door to a mining family and remembers playing with the mercury as a child. “It’s fun because you can’t really capture it,” she recalls. Now she works for local government liaising with mines trying to secure permits and become legal.
“It’s the most important step for making mines safe, but the process is very tedious and very long,” she says.
In Paracale, only three areas have been granted the formal designation to allow small-scale mining, while more than 30 applications remain pending, some for almost a decade.
While Pante-Aviado and other advocates work to bring an unwieldy informal sector under regulation, other experts would rather see goldmining end for good. Stephen Lezak, a researcher at Oxford University who studies small-scale goldmining, says: “Mercury is tragic: it destroys lives.
“But even if there were no mercury-assisted goldmining on the planet, the industry would still be massively disruptive,” he says, pointing to hazards such as deforestation, water pollution and dangerous working conditions. Like most small processing sites, PlanetGold also uses cyanide, but claims to limit the amount of the toxic chemical needed by pairing it with amino acid.
In Paracale, however, where four out of five locals rely on gold for their income, Pante-Aviado says it is not practical to stop mining and that efforts to do so would only push the sector further underground.
But Lezak says people should still think twice before buying gold. “Communities have depended on coalmining for years,” he points out, “but that’s not an appropriate line of reasoning for continuing to extract and burn coal.”
While there have been environmental and labour improvements, even at informal mines, miners often work underground for more than 12 hours at a time, having food and drink delivered 80 metres below ground by pulley.
Despite the mercury ban and a greater understanding of the health risks, Suzara says goldmining is not going anywhere.
“It’s the easiest way to earn a living, and it’s cultural,” she says. “It’s what we’re used to.”
