EIA: Can Mining activity be strategically Sustainable?
An interesting case to talk about Environmental Impact Assessment processes is the one involving a mining company in Australia, Iluka Resources Limited, involved specifically in “exploration, project development, operation and marketing of mineral sands products”, as they inform in the website.
Nowadays mining activities are particularly under strong criticism, as the sector is often considered unable to decouple the generation of economic value from the consistent environmental and social distress likely to be experienced along the project and beyond. A valuable verification of this complexity is expressed for instance by the Conga mine case in Peru, which has been recently paralyzed due to strong community opposition, specifically regarding water supply and pollution of waterways.
Nonetheless, the mining sector has not been always under such pressure: Iluka is said to have fulfilled Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation, when implementing a project in the Cataby region of Western Australia in 2005. The company provided detailed plan that identified the likely impacts of its activity on the listed species, and defined measures of avoidance and mitigation to minimize them, as suspending mining adjacent to nest areas during the breeding season of a listed endangered bird species.
The company participates with success also in bigger projects: Authorities in the Murray Basin in north-western Victoria convened approval for expansion of activities in the area, as the “Murray Basin-Stage 2” in 2009.
From a first overview of EIA submitted, while the report appears very concerned regarding main issues as water and biodiversity impacts, I am particularly interested in the objectives related with CO2 emission reduction. Actually, although emission from energy use and transportation during the project implementation are dealt with, no citation is referred to fugitive emissions, which in Australia account for a consistent share of the total.
In addition, from a strategic point of view which should align with long term ecological sustainability (as claimed by objectives 9 and 10) the minerals themselves are a huge concern that find no response: actually heavy minerals and fossil fuels have been sequestered in the lithosphere during million of years processes, in which ecosystems of the earth have been phasing out such toxic substance for life. Reintroducing into ecosystems such materials creates enormous health and environmental issues, as they do not break-down easily in nature and accumulate overall in plants and fatty tissues of animals. Concentration of substances coming from the earth’s crust is a well-known cause of humans’ major diseases.
Consequently my point is: why such considerations are not included into environmental policies and assessments?
The only solution I see is the implementation of a shared responsibility strategy along all the value chain of such substances, from extraction to disposal. Humanity can still enjoy every benefit related to the use of metals, minerals, and fossil fuels, but the only sustainable way is avoiding accumulation of them into ecosystems.
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07 Feb 2012
por
Francesco Mazzeo
IMSD /
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