Putting paid to poisonous waste from mining – before another ecological disaster strikes

Date: 02/10/03

By Karen Carstens

Mining may not appear to be a major threat to the environment in the eyes of EU citizens. However, it produces a huge quantity of toxic waste that must be controlled.

FOR years, mining and quarrying activities were hardly regulated at EU level.

Two environmental catastrophes, 1998's toxic waste dam-burst in Doñana, Spain, and the 2000 Baia Mare gold mine cyanide disaster in Romania, changed all that.

A flurry of legislative activity culminated in June with a European Commission proposal for tougher rules on mining companies to reduce the risks posed by waste dumps and toxic ponds collapsing.

Mining waste does not always spring to mind as being a major environmental threat, as most of us, thankfully, are not confronted by open pits when we look out of our windows.

Yet the quantity of waste that exists in the EU is staggering - the 'extractive industries' produce the biggest volumes of waste of any sector in the EU at 400 million tonnes per year, or 29% of the EU's total, according to the Commission.

Wet sludge from mining and quarrying - which frequently contains toxic heavy metals and cyanide - is often stored in 'ponds' known as tailings lagoons, which are sometimes protected only by makeshift earth dams. These can collapse for a variety of reasons, spilling the waste into the environment and causing long-term pollution of rivers, lakes and wetlands.

In the January 2000 Baia Mare disaster, cyanide waste from a state-owned gold mine in Romania devastated the Danube and tributaries flowing into neighbouring Hungary, where 95% of surface waters originate elsewhere.

According to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Baia Mare remains the most serious cyanide pollution episode on record and the biggest ever freshwater disaster in central and eastern Europe.

Spain experienced a similar spill in April 1998, when a dam-burst at a lead and zinc mine, run by a division of Swedish-Canadian firm Boliden - it unleashed more than five million cubic metres of toxic waste over the Doñana wetlands, one of Europe's most important bird migration stopovers.

“No one should fool themselves that this is just an eastern-European problem,” says Eva Royo Gelabert, WWF European water policy officer, adding that the tailings dams failures and their associated environmental and human health impacts “could have been predicted and prevented if the EU regulatory framework had not been so poor”.

Other accidents have occurred in the UK, Greece and Sweden, including one in September 2000, when another Boliden-owned mining waste dam collapsed in northern Sweden, releasing a million cubic metres of copper-contaminated water into the Vassara River in the country's biggest mine-waste dam collapse.

Gelabert said there are 21 “high-risk” mining waste dams in Romania, Slovakia and Hungary alone, according to a study conducted by the Baia Mare Task Force, which was set up by the governments of Romania and Hungary, the United Nations and the European Commission in the wake of the disaster.

“And these are just a few 'hotspots' - there could be many, many more,” she said. An existing EU framework directive on waste does not include extractive activities, leaving this area overseen almost solely at national level so far, Gelabert explained.

But the WWF, which published its own EU toxic waste storage sites report in April 1999, and other green groups have welcomed recent efforts in Brussels to push through new measures to prevent future accidents.

“We've been very, very pleased by the reaction of the Commission in the mining waste sector,” Gelabert said.

Two Commission communications, one on promoting sustainable development in the sector and another on the safe operation of mining activities were published in May and October 2000, respectively, to assess the situation.

These laid the groundwork for this year's mining waste proposal, which is designed both to minimize operating emissions and prevent accidents.

A key element is a requirement for operators to draft waste management plans, with a classification system for waste facilities to be drawn up after the measure enters into force, probably within the next two years.

In addition, new conditions are to be attached to operating permits and the public will be granted full access to permit information, in accordance with the principles of the Åarhus convention on public participation in environmental decision-making.

The proposal also includes requirements on monitoring operational mining waste facilities as well as for tighter supervision for their closure. In a direct response to Baia Mara, it sets specific limits on levels of cyanide in the tailing ponds of gold mines - 50 parts per million (ppm) falling to 10ppm within ten years.

The proposal will also require national authorities to inspect waste facilities “at regular intervals”, and member states must record and exchange information on the implementation of these measures and lay down penalties for non-compliance.

In an effort to reinforce the 'polluter pays' principle, operators will also have to provide financial guarantees to ensure “appropriate liability cover” is available for possible environmental damage.

The Commission, however, has conceded that “less robust and lesser- known companies may well struggle to arrange the necessary guarantees”.

At the same time, the proposal exempts mining waste from the provisions of the 1999 landfill directive - a position advocated by the mining industry.

The Commission estimates that the new regime will increase mine waste-management costs by 5-10% on average, which the industry argues places an extra burden on it vis-à-vis competitors like China, which they say has far less stringent environmental and health and safety requirements.

The Commission also proposed two other initiatives in the wake of the Baia Mare disaster.

One was a revision of the so-called 'Seveso II' directive regulating accidents with hazardous substances to include the mining sector, which was approved last month. The measure is named after a 1976 chemical accident in Seveso, Italy.

Gelabert said the European Parliament pushed the envelope on Seveso II, going further than the Commission and member states which had initially rejected an amendment to cover dangerous mine and quarry waste lagoons.

The Parliament and Council of Ministers reached agreement in conciliation on the amendment to the EU measure controlling major accident hazards on 9 September.

Another EU initiative in combating mining waste accidents is the publication of a 'best available technique reference' (bref) guide. The EU's integrated pollution prevention and control (IPPC) bureau in May issued a second draft for a bref on the 'management of tailings and waste rock in mining activities', which has yet to be finalised, according to the IPPC's website.

The upshot: “A previously untouched sector is now being subjected to heavy regulatory scrutiny,” as one EU legal expert put it.

Gelabert, however, said that although the WWF is pleased with the Commission's commitment to tackling the potential hazards of mining waste, a preliminary assessment of the draft directive has yielded some points of concern for environmentalists, including a worrisome transitional period.

“If an existing facility is currently polluting, it won't have to do anything about it until the end of the transitional period,” she said.

In practice, this means that all the new rules would not apply to some operators until 2010, or even 2012 for some provisions at the earliest, according to WWF estimates.

“If they are polluting, this needs to be identified and stopped as soon as possible,” she said. “There should be some provision that they must observe these rules the moment they enter into force.”

Another qualm is the draft directive's scope - unpolluted soil is exempt and inert waste is subject only to a limited set of requirements.

“Operators producing non-hazardous, inert waste will have fewer obligations,” Gelabert confirmed.

But waste rock that tumbles into streams and riverbeds - most mining activities are located near water - can still crush and choke plants and fish and even alter aquatic ecosystems, for example by diverting streambed flows.

“Effluent can go in - you can divert (treated) water into water, but you should not divert (inert) waste into water,” she said. “You should never allow extractive waste to just be 'thrown' into water.”

Gelabert added that, although there is a passage in the mining waste proposal stating it should “be compatible” with the EU's 2000 water framework directive, it “doesn't spell out how to do that - that's up to the member states”.

The Commission, however, has claimed it sought to adopt a “flexible” approach that leaves member states “ample room for manoeuvre” in crafting the mining waste proposal.

Mining may not appear to be a major threat to the environment in the eyes of European Union citizens. However, it produces a huge quantity of toxic waste that must be controlled.

ESO: In Focus: Environment: Commission targets waste from mining and quarrying, June 2003 http://www.europeansources.info/record/environment-commission-targets-waste-from-mining-and-quarrying-june-2003/

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