Tony Hotland, Jakarta – Newmont Mining Corp. has admitted to having put tons of mercury vapors into the air in Buyat Bay, North Sulawesi, but insists that the mercury did not have negative impacts on the bay and its people.
Contesting an article published in The New York Times that quoted a company audit exposing waste management violations by subsidiary PT Newmont Minahasa Raya (NMR), the US firm said the tons of emitted mercury had not posed an environmental hazard.
"Emissions [from the plant] were under the safe limit and Newmont did not violate any laws. Research also show that our operations did not affect the environment, nor the health of the people around," Newmont's senior external relations manager Robert Humberson said on Thursday.
The Times said in its Wednesday issue that an internal audit had warned Newmont executives that NMR was pumping 17 tons of mercury vapors into the air and another 16 tons into the bay over four years since operations began in 1996.
"But our tests in 1997 and 2001 showed emission levels of less than 1 mg/m3, which are under the safe limit of point of source emission regulated in Ministerial Decree No. 13/1995 at 10 mg/m3 in 1995, and at the new 5 mg/m3, which was set as the safe limit in 2000," environmental manager Imelda Adhisaputra explained.
Indonesia does not have any regulations concerning the safe level of metals substances other than lead in the air, only on the point of source.
"The level of dispersed mercury in the air is logically much lower than that at the point of source, which means it's completely harmless," Imelda argued.
Buyat people and activists have accused NMR of polluting the bay, and claimed that the various ailments and deformities suffered by dozens of residents in the area since mining operations began are related.
The latest research by a government team concluded that the bay was polluted with excessive levels of arsenic and mercury. Imelda added that such an emission level did not require any special review as regulated by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). EPA stipulates that a special review is required only when an operation emits over 10 tons of mercury annually.
However, The Times quoted an EPA official specializing in mercury as saying that if 17 tons of mercury were put into the air over four years by a mine in the US, the agency would start an inquiry to examine the health effects.
Although Indonesia does not regulate the mercury level of the air, the government team found the concentration level in the air of Ratatotok village – which is located next to Buyat – to be 0.008 fg/Nm3. That level is about eight million times higher than the World Health Organization's limit of 1fg/m3 of mercury.
Humberson also said that many points in the audit quoted by the US daily were false and had actually been revised after Newmont carried out a due diligence process.
"It's wrong that our scrubber (an air cleaning system used to minimize pollution) did not work most of the time. We also had reported all information requested by the government during our operations," he said.
However, both Humberson and Imelda said they did not remember the name of the international firm that conducted the 2001 audit.
Elsewhere, police said the case files of six NMR executives had been declared complete by prosecutors, which means that the six will likely face trials in around the next two weeks.
The six – Richard Ness, Bill Long, David Sompie, Jerry Kojansow, Phil Turner, and Putra Widjayatri – are charged with Law No. 23/1997 on environmental management, which carries a maximum sentence of 15 years in jail and a Rp 750 million (US$80.403) fine.