EcoLur
In 2011 the National Assembly of Armenia at the suggestion of the Armenian Government adopted RA Code “On Subsoil”, while almost all environmental organizations and independent experts opposed to it. The government lobbied the code together with the World Bank, which supported the financial development of the new code. The Code “On Subsoil” gave the answer to the question how much the industrialists should pay for the wastes – zero drams. Now it’s profitable to develop mines, which used to be considered non-perspective with low concentration of gold, silver or molybdenum. One of the reasons is there is no need to pay for million tons of poisoning wastes – tails and barren rock, wastes. The code called their tails anthropogenic mines, while tails are barren rock, though they are barren in regard with the concentration of precious metals. All other impurities, such as arsenic, mercury, lead, chromium etc, are fully available there.
But now WB expert Adriana Jordanova expressed her content with the Code “On Subsoil” during the discussion of new draft law “On environmental impact expert assessment” and noted that the new draft law should comply with this code.
Reminder: the USA has already faced the problem of pollution with ore wastes. A citation from the report by the Environmental Protection Agency: Mining in the western United States has contaminated stream reaches in the headwaters of more than 40 percent of the watersheds in the West. EPA is spending $30,000 per day to treat contaminated mine drainage at the Summitville Mine in Colorado, which will cost an estimated $170 million to clean up. Remediation of the half-million abandoned mines in 32 states may cost up to $35 billion or more.” (http://water.epa.gov/lawsregs/lawsguidance/cwa/economics/liquidassets/dirtywater.cfm).
The abandoned mines are rather old: they used to be mines when the industrialists in the USA didn’t pay for the wastes. Now the industrialists pay both for the development and wastes and further remediation of the territory this exonerating the tax payers of their country from this burden. We don’t even have any choice to pay or to get poisoned with the wastes, because nobody is going to remediate the used mines, neither the state nor the industrialists.
February 17, 2014 at 14:31