INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

The issue isn't just STD - the problem is tailings: the problem isn't just tailings, the issue is largescale mining.

The safe disposal of mine-mill wastes ("tailings") poses the biggest challenge to the global mining industry: a challenge it is failing to meet, as catastrophic failures of waste containment proliferate, and while endemic problems are far from solution. This crisis is a direct result of strategies by corporate miners to cut costs, as they face falling or fluctuating profits, the pressures of competition and the dramatic collapse in prices of some metal markets. Their strategies include:

• geographic expansion (marked new investment for exploration and exploitation of promising greenfield deposits in tropical zones);
• political (increased corporate access to deposits, as state control founders, and landowner/Indigenous Peoples' rights fail to be honoured);
• market-driven opportunism (especially in the case of gold);
• technical cost-cutting (open-pit and strip mining rather than underground extractive techniques; increasing adoption of solution extraction; cheaper means of waste disposal)
  

Know your opponents! Better technical understanding is crucial. But it's not the whole picture...

Understandably, it is the technological aspects of the "modern face of mining" which are least understood by those outside the mining industry yet concerned about its impacts. Nowhere is this better illustrated than with STD (Submarine Tailings Disposal) 1 the practice of piping mine/mill tailings as a slurry onto the seabed, now increasingly favoured by mining companies in the Asia Pacific region.

This is regrettable, because it enables industry defenders of "bad practice" to pull the wool over critics' eyes ("You do not understand the technicalities of what we're proposing, so how can you say it's harmful?") It can also create divisions between critics of mining who have a scientific training and the majority who don't. Meanwhile largely untested, and certainly highly dubious, practices slip from "testing" towards "good practice", with barely a pause for democratic discussion and examination.

Whatever some spokespeople may claim, STD is not universally accepted: indeed it is specifically precluded by state regulation in the USA - the world's biggest single consumer of metals and, after earlier experiments, it has effectively been banned for nearly a decade in Canada. This heightens the anomaly that two of the four key corporate practitioners of STD (Placer Dome and Newmont) are based in North America, yet they feel free to do overseas (primarily in the Asia-Pacific) what they clearly could not get away with closer to home.
Were STD to be specifically endorsed by the key mining nations, this could make a crucial difference to the economic viability of a significant number of new projects. The major justification would be the escalating environmental and social costs of conventional containment: specifically the squandering of vital agricultural land, the threats of chronic tailings containment collapse, and the problems of permanent waste detoxification and rehabilitation. If STD became accepted as the safest means to deal with the single most intractable negative burden in mining, then other grounds for opposing a mine project inevitably would be weakened. It is not that these arguments lose their validity, but it would become more difficult to assert them as sufficient in themselves.

Conversely, if it could be demonstrated that STD presents threats equal to - or worse than - land disposal, at least some socially unacceptable mine proposals would never leave the drawing board. This would be more likely if its use were shown to threaten not only economic and ecological values, but to deny human and political rights as well.

Some caution is called for here. We should not focus on STD as if it were a discrete - or uniquely threatening - methodology, whose abolition would be sufficient in itself. Such a strategy could actually reinforce industry pressure for land options and enlargements of the area of tailings (including "buffer") sites. This could justify wholesale removals of Indigenous and farming/food gathering communities from their territory, to supposedly protect their safety and health.
Improvement is a chimera: the problems are bound to get worse. Look who's in charge...

Nor should we be taken in by promises of better tailings containment on land. The stark reality is that - whatever "improved" techniques have been adopted in the past decade - as pits have got bigger, ore grades tended to become lower and mechanisation expanded - so the number and severity of catastrophes has increased exponentially. Over the past decade (1990-2000) there has been an average of one "world class" catastrophe every year.

One of the compelling arguments against STD made in the present study is that, though its chief advocates are high-profile companies and global technical consultancies, they have a disturbing reputation for drastic errors, deceits, malfeasance, and sheer incompetence. They are not new players in the game, who can boast unsullied reputations and argue they should be given a chance to prove their worth. On the contrary they are BHP, Placer Dome, Rio Tinto, Kvaerner and (to a lesser extent) Newmont, responsible for some of the world's most damaging mine projects, which have had disastrous consequences: Bougainville, Ok Tedi, Marcopper, and Grasberg. In the light of such recent histories, it is hardly surprising these outfits have been so ready to advocate a new methodology which promises to propel their biggest problem "out of sight and mind".

Above all - an Asia-Pacific issue

This paper was called for in 1999, as the result of demands made by several specific communities in the Pacific region. The demands centred on the unacceptable operations of the Newmont Minahasa mine, planned operations of Aurora Gold (both in North Sulawesi, Indonesia) and of the huge Batu Hijau copper-gold mine on Sumbawa Island, Indonesia (also managed by Newmont). They were also prompted by the intended use of STD by the Canadian-Norwegian mining company Mindex (assisted by Norwegian-British Kvaerner as its prime engineering consultant) on the island of Mindoro in the Philippines. By this time, other regional projects had come under attack because of their use, or intended use, of STD: notably Misima, Lihir and Ramu, all three in Papua New Guinea.

In 1996, the collapse of tailings "containment" at the Philippines' Marinduque mine became the focus for joint international action against Placer Dome, its Canadian manager. Placer had already emerged as the world's chief corporate proponent of the practice: in 1997 it advocated STD as the preferred option for final disposal of tailings which had spewed into Calancan Bay, Marinduque (see below).

A movement emerging...a proposed conference, and next steps
During 1999, at least four major Northern NGOs concerned about mining's impacts were independently marshalling critiques of STD. Hot on the heels of the Los Frailes tailings dam collapse (Figure 1) the world's biggest public subscription conservation organisation, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), called on the European Commission to draw up a management plan for tailings and minewaste [Mining Journal April 23 1999]. By the end of that year, the Indonesian national alliance on mining, JATAM, had mobilised against the practice throughout the country, and community action was being directed against the three mines mentioned earlier. A transnational campaign was initiated (in the Philippines, Norway and Britain) to support communities on Mindoro in their efforts to halt the Mindex project.

In Papua New Guinea, the leading peoples' rights organisation, ICRAF, assisted by the Australian Mineral Policy Institute (MPI) took up cudgels against the Ramu nickel-cobalt project, as did Papua New Guinea's National Fisheries Authority (see Figure 2). Meanwhile, although a united community campaign has not yet emerged to halt the huge Lihir gold mine, several land owner and church groups have expressed concerns about the ocean dumping of wastes, as well as other aspects of mineral exploitation on the island (Figure 1).
Following field trips to Indonesia and the Philippines in 1998-1999, and discussions with community representatives in both countries, Minewatch Asia-Pacific and Down to Earth (the International Campaign for Ecological Justice in Indonesia) became convinced of the urgent need for a Pacific-based communities' conference on the practice of STD.

This paper is an attempt to summarise what is known of STD's current and past impacts, in order better to determine the agenda of such a conference. We must stress that it is a working paper, not a statement of any group's current policy. We very much hope that it will be read in this light. We warmly invite you to contribute additions, corrections and other proposals.