Amazon’s gold mining wasteland could fund $90 billion environmental recovery and create 200,000 jobs

Decades of illegal gold mining have turned vast swaths of the Amazon rainforest into a toxic wasteland, but new analysis suggests this environmental disaster could paradoxically fund its own cleanup while creating hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Since the 1970s, wildcat gold mining operations have destroyed at least 865,000 acres of Amazon forest and wetlands, with the true extent likely much higher. In Brazil’s Pará state alone, mercury contamination from mining has reached crisis levels—75% of residents in the municipality of Santarém show dangerous mercury exposure, with some carrying four times the World Health Organization’s safety limit. The toxic metal continues spreading through river systems, threatening millions of acres of downstream habitat and the communities that depend on them.

However, researchers have identified a remarkable opportunity hidden within this environmental catastrophe. The primitive mercury-based extraction methods used by garimpeiros (wildcat miners) capture only 40-60% of available gold, leaving billions of dollars worth of precious metal sitting in contaminated mining tailings. These waste piles contain an estimated 1,400-2,100 metric tons of recoverable gold valued at approximately $90 billion.

Formalizing these mining operations with modern, mercury-free extraction technology could simultaneously remediate contaminated sites, recover the remaining gold wealth, and generate more than 200,000 legitimate jobs in the formal economy. This approach would transform the Amazon’s toxic mining legacy from an ongoing environmental liability into a self-funding restoration project, offering a potential win-win solution for both economic development and ecological recovery in one of the world’s most critical ecosystems.