Assessment of Water Quality and Pollution Load Capacity in a Taluduyunu River, Gorontalo Province: The Impact of Artisanal Gold Mining Activities
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artisanal gold mining, pollution load, water quality, carrying capacity, analytic hierarchy process
Abstract
Artisanal small-scale gold mining (ASGM), locally known as PETI (Penambangan Emas Tanpa Izin), has substantially altered the upstream Taluduyunu River in Pohuwato Regency, Gorontalo Province, a reach supplying drinking water to roughly 19,686
residents through PDAM Tirta Maleo. To quantify the scale of this degradation, water quality was assessed at four stations across the disturbance gradient during the 2023 dry season, covering 24 physicochemical parameters against Class II standards (PP 22/2021). Among all parameters measured, only total suspended solids (TSS) exceeded regulatory thresholds. At SR3, the most intensively mined station, TSS reached 21,000 mg/L, 420 times the 50 mg/L Class II limit, while BOD and COD remained below detection limits at all locations. The pollution index (PI) placed SR3 in the heavily polluted category (PI = 10.01) and SR2 and SR4 in the moderately polluted range. Actual TSS loads exceeded assimilative capacity (TMDL) by approximately 100-fold: BPA = 5,237,913.6 kg/day against
BPM = 52,272 kg/day, leaving a deficit of roughly 5.2 million kg/day and requiring a 99% load reduction for compliance. Multi-stakeholder analytic hierarchy process (AHP) analysis ranked TMDL determination (weight 0.341) and river classification (0.264) as the
most urgent interventions, ahead of community outreach, monitoring, and law enforcement. The combined TMDL–AHP approach developed here may transfer to other ASGM-impacted watersheds, contributing to SDG 6 and SDG 15 objectives.
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