University Place Wednesday Nite @ the Lab Joanna Skluzacek, "Water Quality Concerns in Africa" 8/25/2010  UP 476   cc >> Tom Zinnen: Welcome, everybody, to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen and I work here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and for UW Biotechnology Center and for UW Extension. Welcome to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. Tonight we have Joanna Skluzacek, the new state specialist in STEM, which is Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, at the University of Wisconsin Extension. She's a 4H state specialist and I'm very much looking forward to getting to work with her over the next few months, next few years, because it's going to be great to have more science and technology, engineering, and math opportunities for 4H youth across Wisconsin. Joanna was born in Lonsdale, Minnesota and went to Mankato State. She got her PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005 in Environmental Chemistry and Technology. Then she went to Penn State as a post-doc during which time she spent a couple of years in Ghana as a National Science Foundation Discovery Corps member. She came back to UW-Madison, excuse me, UW Extension here in Madison on May 14 of 2010, and like I say, it's really great to have this and this greater capacity to serve young people and give them opportunities in science through 4H in Wisconsin. Joanna will be talking about water quality concerns and remediation strategies for rural Ghana in Africa, connecting science and society. 

Please join me in welcoming Joanna to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. (applause) Oh, wait a minute now, I have to test it. (taps microphone) >> Joanna Skluzacek: Okay, I turned on my microphone so hopefully everyone can hear me. Thanks, Tom, and thanks, everyone, for coming this evening to hear about my talk. Again, I just started and it's really great to be back here in Madison as a 4H STEM specialist. I've been away for about five years at Penn State, so it's nice to be back. Today I am going to talk to you about some research that I did in Ghana, Africa, as Tom said. I did this as part of a National Science Foundation grant in collaboration with Penn State and the Center for Nanoscale Science at Penn State, so I just want to make sure I give credit where credit is due. That's where the funding came from. Today I'm going to talk a little bit about my experiences in Ghana and some of the water quality research that I had done and some of the things I encountered while traveling in Ghana. 

It was definitely a new experience for me and I learned a lot, and I'm happy to share that with you tonight. First I just want to sort of talk just a little bit about environmental research. I think everyone in this room probably has a pretty good idea that environmental research doesn't occur in a black box. There's a lot of other things you have to consider when you're doing environmental research, and definitely when you're doing environmental research in a totally new environment, as I was, coming from Pennsylvania and being trained in the United States and going to a developing country like Ghana. And so there were a lot of things that I tried to prepare very well for, some things I was really naive about, and I'm happy to say that this project was successful, but sometimes fairly stressful. And things you need to consider are sort of the cultural, the socioeconomic, which is a very large difference between here and Ghana, and then other types of rules and regulations that I wasn't quite aware of when I first got there. Luckily my time there was fairly long so I got to sort of work those things out. And what I did was, I did water quality research on water bore holes. And you can see those in these pictures right here. This is a very typical bore hole. 

You can see a cement structure and a pump, and here I am pumping the pump, and we collect water samples. And these are found in a lot of different rural villages in Ghana. For instance, here's another picture of that. So what am I going to talk about today? I am going to focus specifically on some environmental concerns in this certain region of Ghana called Tarkwa. I want to make it very clear that I am not an expert on Ghanaian government or Ghanaian culture in any way, shape, or form. I was trained as a scientist, but I can share with you some of the things I learned while traveling there. Primarily, I went there, and what was important as far as finding funding for this project was the significant gold mining operations that occur in the western region of Ghana. And so this is definitely a drinking water concern for the villages and I'll explain a little bit more about that as we go along. One of my project goals, or a project goal I'm going to discuss tonight, is, how can we determine the impact of mining on groundwater resources or water resources that villages are utilizing for drinking water, for all of their daily needs. And then I'm going to talk about some of the challenges that I encountered along the way. 

And I'm going to go into a lot of the sort of chemistry and analytical methods and talk a little bit about how I actually got some of the results, because it's been very different than maybe some of the talks you've heard here at Wednesday Nite @ the Lab, where researchers are doing work, say, at a UW laboratory. The facilities are quite different, as you might imagine, and so I can talk a little bit about how the methodology is different. I'm going to discuss my results and some of the remediation strategies that we worked to develop as we were going along. There was just one more thing I wanted to introduce before I get into the main bulk of my talk. This is mainly just to make sure that we're all sort of on the same page when I start talking about different things that are occurring in Ghana at this time. The big difference is between economic and physical water scarcity. As you might imagine, we have some water scarcity issues right here in the United States and this red indicates a physical water scarcity, and we see that in the western United States. Basically, there's not a lot of surface water, it doesn't rain a lot, it's a very arid environment and so we have water scarcity problems in the western United States. What's a little bit different for areas in Africa would be, it's an economic water scarcity. Most people, when they think about doing work in Africa as a continent that it's a very arid place, a lot of desert. 

That's really not the case in southern Ghana. Southern Ghana has a tropical climate, it rains all the time, it's a very high water table, it has a lot of rivers and lakes. However, there's economic water scarcity, meaning that there's not the infrastructure in the country to transport water, to purify water, to distribute it to the masses in a safe and easy way. So that's what we mean by "economic" water scarcity issues. I was in Ghana. This is the African continent, of course. Ghana is this little country right here. The equator actually runs right along here just to the south border. This is a close-up view, and I was in a town called Tarkwa, as I said. It's in the southwestern region. 

As I said before, there's a lot of water resources in Ghana. You can see here, it has an extensive river and lake system. This is the Volta region. Actually it gets quite a bit of hydroelectric power in this area because of the damming of the Volta River. In Tarkwa it's very close to the equator and like I said it has a tropical climate and it rains quite a bit, lots of vegetation, etc. When I went to work there, I actually got connected with a university called the University of Mines and Technology, or you might hear me refer to it as UMaT, which is actually stationed in Tarkwa, Ghana. It's basically a mining university because of all the gold and diamond mining that occurs there. But as we'll talk about, they're starting to become a little bit more aware of some environmental concerns and when I decided to write a proposal, I had some colleagues who had worked in Ghana before. I got connected with the professors and faculty at this university and they were real excited to have a US researcher come and do some work. Basically what I'm going to be talking about is mining industry impacts on water quality, or how we were trying to assess that with my project. 

This is to give you a little bit of idea of what is going on as far as mining industry in Ghana. So this is a graph that's taken from Dr. Richard Amankwah in 2003. He was actually one of my collaborators at UMaT. Here you can see production, and this is either in gold ounces or this could be diamond carats. You can see diamonds that are two lines here. And the gold are the blue circles or blue triangles here. What we saw in Ghana, say, pre-1990 or sort of the early to mid '80s was, there wasn't a lot of gold production in the country. Ghana was going through a lot of transitions in the '50s and '60s, gaining independence. In the mid '80s, a very significant thing happened. The government implemented something called the economic recovery program. 

Now, this economic recovery program basically stated that now manufacturing and mining operations could be foreign-owned, or foreign investments would be taken to supplement or increase the mining and manufacturing capacity in the country. So what they started to see from about the beginning of the 1980s through current times is that they had a significant increase in the total production of gold. And this is mainly because of the foreign companies coming in and being able to put money and capacity into the mining processes. One thing I do want to mention is, so this is total gold production and this little line here is what we call "small scale" gold production. So small scale is also called "artisinal" gold production. It's been occurring for centuries in Ghana and a lot of other places. The difference between these two lines then is large scale mining operations. I'm going to be talking a lot about large scale mining operations, so I just kind of want to give you an idea of how much production is happening currently in Ghana. This continues to increase, definitely with the changes in the global economy. Gold is in high demand. 

So this picture here is a typical large scale gold mining operation. Tarkwa is a town about, I would estimate, a quarter of the size of Madison. That's about the size of the town. The population has grown dramatically because of these new mining companies, but currently there's about five or six of these large scale mining operations occurring in that area. The western region is where about 85% to 90% of Ghanaian gold is mined, and in the Tarkwa region a significant portion is mined. So this is a pretty typical mining operation. You can see the sort of spent ore slags, you can see the mining equipment. This is what it normally looks like. As I said, it's a very tropical area. This was just outside my house. 

This is what I looked at every day. Lots of vegetation, high rainfall. The mining operations, of course, you are changing the environment. They use slash-and-burn technology quite a bit, clear-cutting technology, to remove the vegetation and then really just start to dig. As you can probably expect, they're starting to see some significant environmental effects of these types of practices. Again, this is a large scale mine. You can see the ore coming here. One thing to talk about, when we talk about the difference between large scale mining and small scale mining, is the way gold is extracted from the ore. In large scale mining operations, cyanide is used to extract gold from ore. As we probably know, or I can refresh your memory, cyanide is a pretty potent poison. 

However, it's really good for extracting gold. These large silos, as you can see here, maybe I can... These silos as you see here are filled with cyanide. And you'll normally see about 20 of these large silos on any typical large scale mining operation. They take the ore and put it in these silos. They mix it and they do their processing, and then the sort of spent liquid comes out these pipes. And I'm sorry I didn't get a better picture, but they didn't really like me to be where I was standing. They come out in sort of receptor pools, where then it's treated and released into the environment. In some cases it can be reused several times, the same cyanide. However, spills do occur and quite often you'll hear about large fish kills occurring because cyanide accidentally spilled into the environment. 

And people are very concerned because the spills are happening more frequently as production is increasing. Small scale mining is a little different process. Small scale mining is something we might think about when we think about in the early days of the United States when people went out to California to pan for gold. That's basically the process that these miners are utilizing. They're usually on a riverbed or streambed and they're panning for gold. However, gold is becoming harder and harder to get out of these deposits. The main way small scale miners extract the gold is to use mercury. Now mercury, again, is a significant health hazard. Some may say that it's more of a health hazard than cyanide just because of the way mercury can continue to deposit in the atmosphere. The way they use it does definitely lead to that. 

This is a typical miner and he has some mercury and some ore in a bucket. They don't use any protective equipment, so they usually just mix it with their hands. In some cases they'll use smaller receptacles with cloth and they'll actually, by mouth, they'll suck the excess mercury out of the cloth because it's a very important chemical for them. It's expensive and it's hard to come by, and so they'll suck the excess mercury out and actually spit it into a container to be used again. Once this process is done they actually fire it at a very high temperature and then burn off the excess mercury and end up with something like gold bullion. Now, since they're on the streams, this mercury can get into the water system. But what's also important is, when they burn off excess mercury, mercury will go into the atmosphere and so it can be transported to a very large distribution area, which then is a concern for almost everyone in the country. There are some significant things that we have to keep in mind. We wanted to take a look at maybe what are some of the impacts of these things, at least in the most recent times. This is a typical sampling site. 

Another thing, and this is not specific to Ghana, you'll see this in almost all developing countries, that accessibility to water is also problematic. There might be one bore hole well in the village and so that's where everybody has to go and they might trek some distance to get there. So people line up for basically hours for their turn at the bore hole pump to fill up their container to take it home and to use it for all of their uses during the day. Everything from drinking to bathing to laundry to cooking. Quite often, we sampled during the week and weekdays, usually about 9am to 6pm. We always saw children at these sites collecting water. That just is another thing that we need to keep in mind when we start talking about the relationship between access to clean water and accessibility to water, and also economic development of a country. We talk about children not being able to go to school because they have to do these chores and things at home. It's a big problem when we start talking about children developing and becoming literate citizens. These are some of the samples that we would see. 

It ranged anywhere from fairly clear to very turbid and most of the time people were drinking this water directly without any further purification. As I said, we were focusing mainly on the mining operations. There were a lot of different things we could have focused on, but this is one of the areas that we wanted to really look into. As I said, for large scale mining, what we wanted to look at is, we wanted to take a look at some cyanide concentrations and see if we could actually find any cyanide in the groundwater. Probably we would find low levels, if any. Cyanide breaks down fairly quickly, definitely in the groundwater. But we were also looking for other indicators such as sulfates from acid mine drainage, and nitrate. Nitrate initially wasn't one of our sort of priorities. However, we were starting to see significant concentrations of nitrate. When we think about testing our wells for nitrate in, say, the rural United States, we're normally looking for pollution caused by fertilizers, human waste, etc. 

And we thought that would be a concern here, but what we were actually finding was that it wasn't from waste or fertilizers, it was actually from blasting. They used a lot of explosives, of course, for the large scale mining. They would do a lot of blasting, it would make your house shake. It scared me almost every time it happened. So they use a lot of TNT and of course the "N" in TNT stands for "nitrogen." They also use some other types of explosives that have nitrate. So that also gets into the environment, so we were looking for those markers as well. The small scale mining, as I mentioned, mercury was something we wanted to take a look at. Testing for mercury is really difficult, so we sort of did the best we could. I can show you sort of our results a little bit later. We did look for other things since we were out sampling, we wanted to try to test for as many things as we could with the facilities that we had. 

So we did test for lead and some other transition metals, and bacteria, etc. I'm not going to discuss that in detail, but if you have questions at the end, feel free to ask. I'd be happy to talk a little bit more about that testing. Some of the challenges, as you might suspect, first of all would be analytical equipment to do this sort of testing. If you're living in rural Ghana, you have some very significant factors that you have to think about when you're doing analytical chemistry, one of which is a lack of electricity. Electricity would go out daily and would be out anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of days. Not very good for instrumentation if they had the capacity to actually buy a spectrophotometer or something like that. Actually, my grant supported the purchasing of a lot of water reagent kits and also things like pH meters, dissolved oxygen meters, etc. Things that they didn't have access to at all, which was great, except it made budgeting a big headache. Because not only then are you looking at the cost of supplies, you have to purchase them from, well, the US or from Europe. 

They also had to be shipped to Ghana, Africa, so that was really difficult because we were looking at shipping costs that rivaled the cost of the materials we were using. So that was a significant expenditure and I could have utilized that money a lot differently if I wouldn't have had to spend it on the shipping. Also the timeline for materials to get there. Some chemicals that we used, some extraction acids and bases cannot be air shipped to Ghana or certain areas in Africa because of regulations, so they have to go by boat, which, of course, will take several months to however long it may take for the ship to come into port and then for the ship to be unloaded. Ghana still relies on the chieftaincy - (flubs pronunciation) Chief system! There, I got it out finally. And so every region will have sort of their own way of doing things. This process to ask permission from the chiefs can be very elaborate to very easy, but you don't really know that until you actually get there and you want to try to sample their bore holes. Community information and language. English is actually the national language and that was one of the reasons why I wanted to travel there. But as you can see from the last point, English isn't necessarily the best language for me either, but I wanted to gather some community information. 

Most people in the rural areas will speak their local language, which is Twi, which is not intelligible for me. So I also had to always have people accompany me when I went sampling for other reasons as well, but also the language barrier was fairly significant. Also, cultural stigma. For good reason they asked me a lot of questions about whether I was with the mining company and why anyone from the United States would come to rural Ghana to do water sampling. I can understand definitely their stigma. The mining companies have taken a lot from them in the last 20 years and significantly before that. So it was also a matter of trying to get folks to trust me, to talk to me a little bit, and that of course took time as well. This is a pretty typical house. Thatched roofs, clay sides, so that's normally the dwellings that we were living in. Again there's some kids. 

The kids really thought it was pretty cool to watch me sample. In almost every picture I have, the kids are there. Sometimes I couldn't even get a picture because the kids were crowding all over. But it was cool, I loved it. The methods I used were not necessarily what you might think of as the most expensive or... high-end sort of equipment. I used something called the LaMotte test kit. These are basically surface and groundwater testing kits and the unit, as you can see here, is fairly simple. It's a fairly simple what we call spectrophotometer, which means that it detects color changes. So what we do is, we have our water sample and we put those in the little vials and we add some reagents. 

If that pollutant is present, the reagents will change the water a certain color and our instruments will be able to detect that color change. So if it's used very carefully, and we would always use standards to make sure that we were calibrating things correctly, we always tried to use check samples. If they're used carefully, you can actually get very good readings from low-cost instrumentation like this. As long as the levels of pollutant that you're looking at are fairly high. They don't have very good limits of detection, is what we call it in sort of the scientific community. So if the pollutant is in really low levels, this isn't really the best way to analyze. However, we were looking at some health effects for some very significant chemicals and we were finding those in fairly high concentrations. That part wasn't too much of an issue. We had sample bottles that we shipped in that were sterile and acid washed. Another sort of problem that occurred is, I had to do all the analyses within 24 hours. 

Usually water samples, you can preserve them, but since we didn't really have any refrigeration, that became a big issue. So we tried to keep the samples as cool as possible. That just meant that we had to have multiple sampling trips, and so we were going out quite frequently to collect a small amount of samples, so then I could go back to the laboratory and analyze them within 24 hours for all the analytes. This made things a little bit more difficult and we probably could have done much more sampling if we wouldn't have had the problem of trying to get transportation to the sites as often. Let's start talking about some of the results. As I said, for large scale mining operations, we were looking for some key pollutants. First of all, I'm going to talk a little bit about sulfate, sulfur, and nitrates, which is this right here. And so here on this axis is concentration in milligrams per liter, you can say "parts per million" if you'd like. These are the ten sites that we focused our study on. Initially we sampled about 50 different sites and then what we did is, we tried to weed out some of the sites and determine what might be the most effective and efficient way to utilize our facilities and our funding. 

We tried to focus on ten sites around the city, fairly close to large scale mining operations. Also, accessibility to these sites was a factor and also if we were allowed to sample or not. Sometimes the chief said, "No, you can't sample," and so then we couldn't do that. These are the ten sites that we picked. This first one here, UMaT, that's a bore hole that's actually on the college campus that people use for drinking quite often. And then these other sites. This is what we were sort of seeing and this will become more significant as I talk about some of the other results. In Akoon, Simpa, and Aboso, we were seeing significantly higher levels of sulfate and nitrate than the other sites, which were sort of what we were seeing as a baseline. Akoon, there was a lot of nitrate and this, as we found out by talking with some of the villagers, they had been actively blasting in that site quite often for the months up to when we were sampling. Another thing we wanted to know is if the nitrate was actually because of sanitation problems in the village versus the mining operations. 

That's very hard to determine because sanitation is, of course, an issue. There's no indoor plumbing, so normally latrines are used. However, we didn't find any bacterial contamination in this particular sample, which tells us that it's probably not fecal coliform bacteria. The nitrates might be coming a little bit from sanitation, but we think that it's mostly from the blasting, or at least that's what our assumptions came to. If we move on to cyanide, this graph looks really scary, but it's not, because the concentrations here on the axis are very, very low. Actually, pretty close to our limit of detection. The WHO guideline for cyanide is 0.07 milligrams per liter. As you can see with all of the sites, we are well below that, at least ten times, if not more, below the WHO guideline. Cyanide, very low levels, it was really hard to detect, as you can tell by some of the error bars here, just because the levels were so low and our equipment wasn't really capable of going much lower than this. That was good to see that we didn't see any spiking effects, at least for cyanide, for samples that we looked at. 

Mercury again is, as I said before, fairly hard to monitor in the environment. The WHO guideline for mercury, 0.006 milligrams per liter, which is also this black line here. Our limit of detection for our instrument was, I believe, 0.03 milligrams per liter. So this data is very hard to take and say anything about significant differences in sites, or about statistical comparisons. However, we did see something that was sort of interesting when we looked at it alongside our other sites. For example, Aboso, Akoon, and Simpa, again we were seeing a little bit higher levels than in the other water samples. We saw this pattern for a lot of different things that we looked at in these three particular sites. So research is still ongoing at those sites, at least, and we wanted to continue to see if there were some changes here in the mercury concentration because of small scale gold mining. As I said, we did do some other sampling, so this just gives you a snapshot of some of the other pollutants that we tested for. We tested for molybdenum, manganese, and lead. 

We're probably most familiar with lead. Lead, of course, is fairly harmful. It's definitely harmful to children as far as cognitive development and it's also sort of a neurotoxin. So the WHO guideline is listed here, 0.01. All of the ten sites had levels well above the WHO limit of safety for drinking water, which is very problematic. Manganese, most of the sites, again, had higher levels than permitted by WHO. We saw the same thing with molybdenum. This is really a problem and although we cannot specifically link this to the mining operations, we can make a few generalizations about why these might be showing up in the groundwater system. As I said, because Ghana is sort of a topical environment, its water table is quite high. Within about five to ten meters, you'll actually find water if you dig a hole, okay? So these mining operations, of course they're going far deeper than that. 

We're talking about hundreds and hundreds of feet to do the mining. So we know that it's having some sort of influence on the groundwater system and we know that as we change and expose some of these minerals that these elements are in, we change the oxidation states. We expose them to oxygen when maybe they weren't exposed to oxygen before. Or we changed the pH of the system because of acid mine drainage. So that will change some of the solubility of these guys, and so we might be able to see higher levels of these sort of contaminants in mining operations. However, that's sort of a leap and there's no definite way to really track this. As far as lead, I can tell you that about ten years ago they stopped using leaded gasoline, maybe a little bit more, ten or fifteen years ago they stopped using leaded gasoline, but it still could be getting into the environment, and for at least the small scale and large scale mining operations, they still use lead batteries for lighting in the mines. The spent batteries are normally just discarded in the mine when they're finished and so that could also be a factor with lead. However, like I said, we don't really know. A little bit of gloom and doom there, sorry about that. 

But in some sites we did find that the water was actually fairly good. We did have some problems with some metals, but in some cases the water was close to safe for drinking, that's what I can say. We knew we had these problems, we knew we had problems even going in, though we couldn't necessarily say what kind of problems we had and what areas we were looking at. However, we really went into this with a mindset of, well, if we have these problems, how can we find ways to help these problems? How can we make their drinking water a little bit better? How can we utilize local resources and do some local education to try to keep people more safe? Sand has been used, sand vats, so basically, pouring your water through a large container of sand. If it's very fine sand, it will remove a lot of the particulate matter, so the larger pieces of junk that you might find in there. That can help purify your water. But we also know clay has some very interesting characteristics that we might be able to utilize for water purification. Clay is, of course, the same kind of clay you dig out of the ground, and you can find it in Ghana as well as clay soil. Clays are sort of an interesting thing, because clay's backbone, or most clays, are aluminum, silicon, and oxygen. And these atoms come together and they form the basic structure of most clays. 

Now, when these atoms come together, what it does is, it imparts a slight negative charge on the surface of the clay material. So this means that the clays then have a slight negative charge to them. The pollutants that I was talking about, things like lead, mercury, we talked about iron, we talked about these transition metals, many times when they're dissolved in water they're positively charged. They become ions. So plus one, plus two, plus three, they have a slight positive charge. What we can start to think about is, if we have some clay in a flow-through water system and we pour our polluted sample in, maybe these ions will actually be attracted to the clay because they have a different charge. Opposites attract in this case. What we sort of started to play with is different types of clays that we found in the area. We milled them a little bit differently. For example, we heated this clay up in a kiln furnace to about 800 degrees to burn off all the organic matter, and then we crushed it down. 

As you can see here, we just used a simple water bottle that can be found really anywhere in Ghana. This is actually a 1.5-liter water bottle. You can find these on the markets for maybe about one cent or so, if there's even a charge at all. I poked some holes in the bottom and lined it with some cloth, a few layers of regular cotton cloth. I put some sand in, then a layer of clay, then another layer of fine sand. What we wanted to do is, we tested a whole bunch of different things. We actually just sort of got to the point where we were starting to see some results, and so the results I'm going to show you are very preliminary. I don't have any error bars on them, however, they were confirmed by another test method of a laboratory in --. So I'm fairly confident of the results here. However, we must keep in mind that for the testing we were using fairly high concentrations of these different analytes. 

It doesn't necessarily mirror the real world, but we wanted to sort of get an idea if this would work at all. In many cases, it did. I was pleased to see that for certain ions in solution, cobalt, copper, etc., lead, we were seeing a decrease in the amount. We have more investigation to figure out whether that's actually absorbing tightly onto the clay or whether it's a very superficial sort of thing where it will start to rinse off in a few minutes. So that work is still ongoing. Unfortunately, I'm not part of the work anymore, but this was at least something that we were happy to see. There were some other materials that they're currently testing. They mine a significant amount of bauxite in that area and bauxite can sometimes be used as an absorbent. They can also use charcoal. If you think about activated charcoal like with our Brita filters, this is basically, charcoal is charred vegetation. 

It definitely would not have the capacity of something like an activated charcoal filter that we have, but we know that charcoal can absorb certain pollutants and investigation is sort of taking place with that as well. I just kind of wanted to finish up here with a few different things. In this talk, it was sort of just a snapshot of work that we did over a couple of years, and I was actually in Ghana for six months in 2008 and six months in 2009 working on the project. The faculty there, and I had a couple of graduate students who were part of the university, were also helping me sample and doing these analyses and are hopefully still continuing to utilize the equipment that I left. We know that mining is causing some changes to the environment in and around Tarkwa. We at this point don't know the extent. the mining operations have really only been exploding in the last 20 years and as history tells us, long-term environmental damage can take decades in order to understand. But at least, even though Ghana is sort of in its infancy when starting to think about environmental concerns, they are making progress and they are putting money and resources from the mining companies into looking at environmental concerns. Like I said, it's still very slow and the socioeconomic situation in Ghana is moving along at a fairly slow rate, but I'm hopeful and I'm expecting that in a few years that we'll have moved even further forward in thinking about the environment. A few sites that we studied, Akoon, Simpa, Aboso, had levels of some chemical indicators that we might be able to attribute to large scale mining. 

The mercury contamination was also sort of fuzzy. We don't have a really good limit of detection for what we were looking for with our equipment. However, we know that mercury is used all the time by small scale miners. We do know that it's getting into the environment. Just because we can't stick a number on it, I'm very confident that there are environmental concerns when we start talking about the mercury contamination in this area. More work needs to be undertaken not only to understand sort of the chemicals and the pollutants that are there, but also then, now what do we do? Rural Ghana is a developing country and as I said, the infrastructure is really lacking. So most people do not have indoor plumbing. They go to the bore hole for all of their water needs. There's a latrine, which is sometimes sited fairly close to the bore hole where everybody uses and the population is growing significantly because of the mining operations, so I believe the capacity of some of these latrines and also the water system is being taxed. There really has to be a lot more work done in the remediation aspect, and of course, it's not going to happen overnight and there are a lot of things we have to consider as far as education on how to use some of these remediation technologies. 

They have to be very low cost. Most of the country lives below the poverty line of $2 per day. And they have to be local because transportation infrastructure is also a problem. In my opinion, that's really where the work needs to be moving and I'm happy to say that the materials, the equipment and materials that I used for my project were then donated to UMaT for the students to continue to use. They have students who are interested in environmental concerns with mining and so I think that more data will be coming through soon. I want to make sure that I acknowledge National Science Foundation for the funding for this project over two years, for the Discovery Corps post-doctoral fellowship, the MRSEC Center for Nanoscale Science, which was sort of my home department while I was at Penn State, and they were very helpful as far as facilitating the administration of this grant, and definitely, sorry, the University of Mines and Technology.  Let's just get back to that real quick. Dr. Richard Amankwah was kind of my faculty director when I was there. He's now the Dean of Students at UMaT. Fifi Quansah is a master's student that I worked with very closely. 

He was actually helping with the sampling and going out to sampling sites and this work has become part of his master's thesis. So thank you very much and I will take any questions. (applause)