Reclamation of Mercury-Contaminated Tailings from Small Gold Mining

This Mitacs Accelerate proposal is the second of three-phase project of Adriana’s Goncalves master’s thesis. For this Mitacs-Accelerate renewal proposal, it will be investigated further flotation process targeting recovery of 80-90% considering a previous technical feasibility study conducted on material from a representative sample of ASM tailings from Costa Rica. The tailings belong to a small Canadian company, Newlox Gold Ventures Corp. a new gold processing and trading company pursuing precious metal related business opportunities in Latin America. A higher flotation recovery could allow the project to be economically viable.
The case study for this research will take place in Canada at the laboratories of UBC Dept. of Mining. This conceptual study is critical to establish the basic parameters for the processing design, required to develop the unit operations of the processing plants to be recommended for the Newlox Gold as a result of this research. The research is also part of a larger conceptual model of Small Mining Is Beautiful which defends that small gold plants can be cleaner and more sophisticated than the usual ones generating more environmental and social benefits in developing countries

Faculty Supervisor:

Marcello Veiga

Student:

Partner:

Newlox Gold Ventures Corp

Discipline:

Engineering

Sector:

Administrative and support, waste management and remediation services; Mining

University:

The University of British Columbia

Program: