ASGM Baseline Practice Exercise

Estimating Mercury Use and Documenting Practices in Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining (ASGM) - Methods and Tools. This document presents a structured training exercise designed to guide inventory officers in estimating gold production, mercury use, and workforce size in a fictional artisanal and small-scale gold mining community. It describes the site context, including mining methods, processing workflows, labor organization, and revenue distribution, and explains how field data were collected through interviews, physical measurements, and observations. The document provides a detailed dataset and walks through multiple calculation methods, including extraction-based, processing-based, and earnings-based approaches, with explicit assumptions and cross-checks.