Artur Grigoryan, President of “EcoRight” NGO
The National Assembly, with enthusiasm, discusses a business project, which is supposed to have multimillion-dollar investments. It is an unprecedented program that will comprehensively solve environmental and social problems, accumulated in Artsvanik, Voghji and in Pkhrut tailing dumps because of mining waste and will start a “low-waste” mining industry in Armenia.
A company having an endearing name “Alyotig” submitted an application for re-cultivating combine’s 2 tailing dumps (not to confuse with “reclaim” term) , which have been closed since the Soviet Union and has no legal status now , but is under state care. According to the project, the tailing dump and continuously flowing wastes of Artsvanik will be given to this company’s ownership.
At the same time the inventor, as it was mentioned, has nothing to do with the owners of Qajaran combines, offers to take out Artsvanik’s enormous and completely filled tailing dumps of the combine’s balance after which the government will give it to him for reprocessing. Qajaran combine is released from “recultivatation ” of the tailing dump because of this good work, which requires huge financial investments without the prospect of further benefits.
According to the main speaker about the bill in National Assembly Deputy Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Areg Galstyan, the factory must process 12.5 million tons of tails producing a variety of metallic and non-metallic products in the first phase of the project during 5 years,.
Simultaneously, according to the information on the combine website the plant annually produces about 12.8 million tons of ores, which are filled in tailings about the same number with mass of water. This means that at least in the first phase of this project the company will hardly process only current produced waste rather than the tailings. Member of PAP Mikayel Melkumyan who is familiar with this project and co-speaker Vardan Ayvazyan confirmed about this.
Let’s move on, Vardan Ayvazyan also added that in the case of processing 12.5 million tons, a maximum, almost identically, quote “150 thousands, well let it be 200 thousand tons of material will be removed. The rest must be placed somewhere”. That is to say, the mass is almost completely must be again filled somewhere, which must be taken from communities according to the law, and the place will be so big that it can annually fit 12 million tons of processed tailings.
According to the PAP MP Melkumyan observations, in the next stage, after five years, it is planned to increase processing capacity by 25 million tons annually. It should also be noted that Kajaran’s combine also doesn’t hide its intention to increase production even more than the 25 million tons.
It turns out that this processing plant will work only for processing Kajaran combine tails and to replace the rest mass in tailings.
Here comes another important question, why the names of other tailings are being circulated. I must repeat once again that combine’s elite is trying to get rid of recultivation costs. In RA Mining Code book "conservation" concept, which has no legal definition is used instead of “recultivation”, which doesn’t assume any legal liability for company, in the issue of proper care of tailings. The giant dump of mining waste, simply is thrown to us packed with an attractive and barren words. Actually no one will process the tailings at least not in such "Investment Plan".
Thus we dash several targets with one shot. As the main aim of the project, instead of Artsvani tailing which already filled with 90 percent and having only one year to place the combine’s waste, a new one is building with forced acquisition of land guarantees and liberation of recultivation costs of filled tailings.
June 18, 2015 at 18:02