EPA Gold Shop Mercury Capture System
Channel: LuisFernandezEcology
Date: 03/11/2011

This video describes the Gold Shop Mercury Capture System (MCS), a low cost and easy to build technology that can reduce mercury vapor and aerosols emitted by artisanal gold shops by as much as 80 percent. 

The MCS is currently being used successfully in gold shops in several cities and town in gold producing regions in Peru and Brazil -- and has the potential to be used in countries through Central and South American, Sub-Saharan Africa

This video presents an overview of the growing problem of mercury contamination of cities and towns in over 60 countries due to gold shop emissions.   A description of the MCS how it works, and how it can be built in the towns it will be used using common tools and materials follows. 

The video ends with a discussion of how the wide-scale use of the MCS in gold producing areas can result in the prevention of hundreds or even thousands of kilograms of airbourne mercury from being released and contaminating people, flora and fauna. 

The plans and schematics for this technology is available internationally at no cost through a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs License to facilitate its widespread use. 

This project was funded by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) Office of International and Tribal Affairs with the assistance of the Argonne National Laboratory's Environmental Science Division.

Collaborators on this project include:  Marilyn Livingood and Marianne Bailey (USEPA), Loren Habegger, Jim Bailey and David Peterson (Argonne),  and Luis E. Fernandez (Carnegie Institution- Global Ecology and Argonne) 

For more information, please contact Marilyn Livingood at livingood.marilyn@epa.gov or Luis Fernandez at luisf@stanford.edu. 

Produced by Kalypsis Productions. 
Running time is 9:49 minutes.