Artisanal and small-scale gold mining is present in more than eighty countries and supports the livelihoods of over fifteen million miners directly, and many millions more indirectly. It is also the largest single source of anthropogenic mercury emissions, and the great majority of it operates outside a legal framework. Those two facts are usually presented as a dilemma. In practice they describe a sequencing problem: mercury use falls when operations are formalised, and formalisation requires a buyer.
Why exclusion has not worked
The Minamata Convention on Mercury requires parties with mercury-based ASGM to take steps to reduce and, where feasible, eliminate its use. Article 7 obliges national action plans rather than an outright ban. Reviews of the sector are consistent on the reason earlier reduction efforts largely failed: measures were imposed on operations that remained unregistered, unrecognised and unprotected by state law, and so had no route to compliance and no incentive to seek one.
The commercial equivalent of that failure is a red flag applied at the refinery gate. A cooperative excluded from the legitimate chain does not stop producing; it sells into a less documented one, at a worse price, with mercury still in use.
The progressive approach
The LBMA’s Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining Toolkit for accredited refiners takes the opposite path. Built on the OECD Due Diligence Guidance, it recognises that ASM operations sit at different stages of organisation and provides for progressive implementation of specific goals rather than an immediate exclusion. Where mining with mercury is legal, producers are required to work toward reducing dependence on it; security, health and safety standards must improve continuously rather than be met on day one.
The World Gold Council’s London Principles apply comparable logic to central-bank domestic purchase programmes: gold bought from ASGM must be refined at LBMA Good Delivery List refineries, and programmes must address labour practice, child and forced labour, and mercury reduction.
What it requires from a buyer
A progressive framework only functions if the offtake is real. On our own sourcing relationships, four conditions do most of the work.
A licence, verified. Mining permit, export licence and cooperative registration checked against the national register and the named licence holder — not against a certificate presented at the point of sale.
A price that is fixed and published. Payment against the daily LBMA benchmark less an agreed treatment charge, settled bank-to-bank into the registered cooperative account. No cash, no intermediaries, no advance-against-delivery lending, and no exclusivity clause locking a producer to a single buyer.
Equipment before enforcement. Retort and gravity-separation kits funded at the site, introduced with on-site training. Gravity recovery alone does not eliminate mercury; the transition needs the equipment, the instruction and a purchase commitment that survives the learning curve.
A production baseline. Recorded output capacity per site, so declared volumes can be reconciled against what the ground can plausibly produce. This is the single most effective control against laundering third-party material through a compliant relationship.
The limit
Progressive does not mean permissive. Any indication of child labour, forced labour or armed-group involvement ends a relationship immediately, and purchase is suspended where a funded mercury transition stalls. The distinction worth holding is between a site that is behind and improving under a written plan, and a site that is unwilling — the first is the sector as it exists, the second is not a supplier.
References: Minamata Convention on Mercury, Article 7; LBMA Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining Toolkit for Accredited Refiners; OECD Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible Supply Chains of Minerals from Conflict-Affected and High-Risk Areas; World Gold Council London Principles.