The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has cautioned that restoring the quality of soil degraded by illegal mining, also known as galamsey, could take up to 300 years.
Speaking on JoyNews’s Newsfile on Saturday, October 12, Dr. Albert Kobina Mensa, a research scientist with the CSIR Soil Research Institute, noted that many agricultural fields around the nation have been seriously damaged by the heavy metals and chemicals used in illegal mining, including cyanide and mercury.
While the damaged areas might be used for forestry, Dr. Mensa pointed out that complete soil rehabilitation is more difficult.
Calculations done by the institute using phytoremediation—the use of plants to absorb toxins—show that natural recovery might take over three millennia.
“Some of us have done, and we wanted to see how many years it would be for the soil to restore to its natural state and we were trying to use some which the process is called phytoremediation techniques to see how it is going to remediate the chemicals from the soil and the calculation shows more than 300 years,” he said.
He underlined that without quick actions to solve the harm, the environmental problem could get worse.
Furthermore emphasized by toxicologist Dr. Bright Boafo Boamah that the process of recovering water bodies polluted by galamsey might take ten to fifteen years.
He underlined, meanwhile, that the ecological recovery of rivers and streams is still complicated and calls for constant observation and correction even with fast intervention.
