Artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) generates livelihoods for millions in the Global South. It is also the largest anthropogenic emitter of mercury to the atmosphere. In light of failures by public institutions to affect informal and illegal mining behaviors, various initiatives have promoted miner-level technologies to reduce mercury in ASGM. After reviewing the limited available evidence on these efforts – in sum, unimpactful – we conceptually, then parametrically, model reasons they often are not locally preferred. Next we consider the viability of a higher-capital technological processing alternative to mercury, ore selling, in which miners sell ores to processing plants that use technologies which are mercury-free and, in addition, raise the share of gold recovered from that ore. Some ore-selling has been adopted privately, without policy, since it can increase income. Yet its impacts on miners and plants remain unclear: who gains? when? how much? why? We take two approaches to these questions. First, we survey the artisanal, female jancheras selected as beneficiaries for one ore-selling pilot in Ecuador, adding a choice experiment in which miners liked some options yet declined offers most similar to the planned pilot. Second, we are documenting one leading private application of this processing approach, both looking back two decades in Peru and setting a baseline for new efforts in Ecuador (to measure mercury, livelihoods, and other impacts from past and ongoing initiatives). Contexts’ details reveal that understanding not only geology but also mining populations and economic dynamics is needed to design policy for heterogeneous ASGM landscapes.
