Wasting the Nation.indd - Groundwork

Chapter 4: The toxic cradle of production• mining companies’ Black Economic Empowerment obligations include equityparticipation and/or community royalties for historically disadvantagedcommunities in mining areas. [2008: 13]The villagers have actively resisted the enclosure of their resources. They have ploughedthe land to establish active ownership, and protested on many occasions – for whichthey have been arrested and jailed. They have enlisted the help of environmental justicelawyer, Richard Spoor, and worked with the social movement Jubilee, groundWorkand the Vaal Environmental Justice Alliance (VEJA) as well as the international socialjustice organisation Actionaid. Ironically, their best hope lies in the falling demand forand falling prices of platinum as the commodity boom is reined in by the prospect ofglobal recession.Steeling the futureIndustrial processes are far more complicated and, in some respects, even more toxicthan mining. Industrial waste is often hidden from public view, being dumped inheaps or ponds on site at the factory and with little regulatory oversight, or illegallyflushed down drains or dumped elsewhere. One toxic waste dump that did attractpublic attention is ArcelorMittal’s (formerly Iscor) slag heap at Vanderbijlpark becauseof the role it played in the destruction of the Steel Valley farming community. Itsneighbours, from Jan Tromp in the 1980s to Strike Matsepe in the 2000s, were drivenout or driven under by the pollution of the groundwater, of floodwater run-off and ofthe dust blown off the heap. 70The Vanderbijlpark Steel plant produces 2.2 million tonnes of solid waste every year.One million tonnes of this is hazardous, containing inorganic contaminants which leakinto the groundwater: manganese, aluminium, cadmium, calcium, chloride, fluorides,iron, sulphates, titanium and zinc. Various organic 71 substances, mainly derived fromcoal tars, pose an additional toxicity threat. Most of these materials are found in thesolid waste dumps, the evaporation dams and maturation ponds.70 See The groundWork Report 2006.71 In chemistry, ‘organic’ refers to compounds containing carbon. These are found in living organisms, as well asthe hydrocarbons that make up fossil fuels and are used as the building blocks of plastics.- 98 - groundWork - Wasting the Nation