- Air pollution: elemental mercury released to the air
- Mercury vapor concentrations in gold shops significantly above the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH) threshold limit value (TLV) for occupational exposure to mercury (25 ug/m3)
- Hydrological changes: erosion and water impairment
- Hg levels 3 to 25 times the national standard of 0.0001 mg/L found in river water (Fraser 2009)
- Mercury and oil is released into the waterways
- Since 2009, an estimated 1,500 liters of oil from machines and boats associated with ASGM have been spilled in MDD (Brack et al. 2011)
- Land degradation/desertization - topsoil removal
- Land could take 500 years to recover (Daley 2016)
- Species, habitat and biodiversity loss
- Deforestation
- ASGM is the leading cause of forest loss in MDD
- In two prominent mining zones in MDD, ~6,600 hectares of wetlands and primary tropical forest were destroyed between 2003 and 2009 (Swenson et al. 2011)
- A recent study (Caballero Espejo et al. 2018) estimates that 64,586 hectares of forest in MDD were lost to gold mining between 2010-2017