Wasting the Nation.indd - Groundwork

Chapter 4: The toxic cradle of productionBox 18: Recycling red mudThe industry is busily looking for ways of getting rid of their mud – along withthe costs of storing it – by touting it as a resource. In Australia, during the 90s,Alcoa helped fund a Department of Agriculture experiment using red mud fromits refinery to stabilise phosphorus run off. The department persuaded farmersto participate in spreading it on their land, claiming that it would substantiallyincrease yields. Instead, the farmers say, their cattle started getting sick. Spread at20 tonnes a hectare, according to journalist Gerard Ryle, the red mud contained“up to 30 kilograms of radioactive thorium, six kilograms of chromium, more thantwo kilograms of barium and up to one kilogram of uranium” together with “24kilograms of fluoride, more than half a kilogram each of the toxic heavy metalsarsenic, copper, zinc, and cobalt, as well as smaller amounts of lead, cadmium andberyllium”. The department nevertheless insisted that this had nothing to do withthe cattle sickening and subsequently marketed the mud to farmers in south westAustralia as a soil dressing. Alcoa agreed that the ‘product’ was safe but neverthelessdemanded, and got, an indemnity for any environmental damage.Source: Gerard Ryle, The great red mud experiment that went radioactive, The Sydney MorningHerald, May 7, 2002.The southern African smelters are the primary market for Worsley’s alumina – althoughthis ‘market’ is obviously internal to the corporation. All three smelters were primarybeneficiaries of state infrastructure investments. The original construction of Bayside,in 1971, was integral to the apartheid state’s simultaneous development of the deepwater port at Richards Bay. The project required close collaboration of governmentdepartments, major state owned corporations – primarily the Industrial DevelopmentCorporation, Eskom and Transnet – and private interests led by AngloAmerican. Theseinstitutional relations were, if anything, strengthened in the post-apartheid periodand Billiton slipped into the seat already warmed by Gencor. Hillside was seen asan anchor project for a Spatial Development Initiative (SDI) intended to inaugurateanother round of industrial modernisation at Richards Bay, while Mozal anchoredthe Maputo Corridor SDI and was accompanied by the development of a deep waterport at Maputo. Mozal also provided a vehicle for practical collaboration between thecorporations at the centre of the minerals and energy complex (state and private) andthe World Bank, so reinforcing local-global institutional relationships as South Africaemerged from isolation.- 120 - groundWork - Wasting the Nation