Jakarta – Environmental damage caused by Freeport's huge gold and copper mine in Indonesia's remote Papua province is much worse than previously thought, an environmental watchdog said Wednesday.
Walhi/Friends of the Earth Indonesia accused the Freeport mine, a joint venture of mining giants Freeport-McMoRan and Rio Tinto, of ignoring government orders to amend its dangerous waste management practices.
"The law is not enforced by the ministry of the environment due to the joint venture's pervasive financial and political influence, to the degree that a Freeport-Rio Tinto proposal for circumventing water quality standards seems to be under consideration," the group alleged in a report.
Walhi said its report is based on unpublished company and government documents from 2002 to 2006.
Walhi mine campaigner Torry Kuswardono said the group found that the Freeport mine was polluting the World Heritage-listed Lorenz National Park. The ground water was affected by mine drainage, which is highly acidic and carries a high level of copper – toxic to people and fish, he told a press conference.
A significant proportion of it is washed up and down the coast, he said. "That's a very significant impact the company has to answer for. The national park is one of the conservation jewels of the planet," he told AFP.
Kuswardono said Freeport is also damaging the environment by dumping copper-rich ore around the edges of the mine, exposing its toxic elements to air and ground water.
"If the company processes the waste rock as ore, as other mines in the world would do, they will extract much copper and there won't be such environment problems," he said.
"What the company does is wasteful but very cost-effective. Their profit increases when they mine the purest-grade ore but the efficiency in mineral extraction terms is very low," he said.
Walhi urged the government immediately to enforce its environmental laws and suspend Freeport's operations until its alleged breaches are remedied. It also urged the government to review tax and royalty arrangements to improve benefits for affected communities.
Freeport spokesman Sidharta Mursjid said he had not studied Walhi's report but the company's recent environmental risk assessment was "consistent with that anticipated by the government's environmental impact analysis."
"As a mining company, we are committed to minimizing the impact of our company's operation on the environment," he told AFP.
Freeport-McMoRan has repeatedly come under criticism for its environmental practices at the mine. A violent mass protest in the Papuan capital Jayapura demanding closure of the mine left six people dead last month.
Indonesia's environment ministry threatened Freeport Indonesia, a local unit of the company, with a lawsuit in March unless it cleans up its act, after a two-week investigation found that it failed to comply with several government standards.
Over three billion tons of tailings and up to four billion tons of waste rock will be generated throughout the life of Freeport's operations, expected to end in around 2040, Walhi said.
Freeport releases the equivalent of 53,000 tons of copper annually into a nearby river, it said. This rate of heavy metal pollution is more than a million times worse than that achievable with standard mining industry pollution prevention practices, it said.