Instead of using mercury to recover gold, use a feather and gently blow...
 | ABSTRACT Pen balls look set to invigorate research into gravitation settling and make affordable experiments on particles as dense as native gold. It is remarkable that the value of pen balls as tracers in gold recovery has been overlooked until now, and their potential in sedimentation experiments has yet to be appreciated.
For centuries, gold miners have preferred sluices to catch placer gold. In spite of innovations such as centrifuges, they prefer the sluice - cheap to make, easy to use and boasting an unrivalled concentration ratio. Yet sluices lose most of the fine gold! Now miners can put this right, aided by pen balls. Success will help to eliminate mercury and boost profits, pulling millions of artisanal miners out of poverty and will increase the efficiency of placer mining companies.
Even cleaning up the gold concentrate for sale need not use mercury – sorting with a bird feather is shown to be easier, quicker and cheaper than using mercury. It is also remarkable that the use of a feather to rapidly clean a dried concentrate ready for smelting seems not to have spread outside the former Soviet Bloc.
Both pen balls and feathers are commended as examples of Best Available Techniques (BAT) for placer geologists and miners worldwide.
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