Morgan Mellish, Timika – In the estuary where the Ajkwa and Otomona rivers flow into the Arafura Sea off the coast of West Papua, a new island has formed in recent years. It is about 10 metres high, one kilometre wide and covered in mangroves.
Some Freeport employees have dubbed it Ajkwa Island and point out that local fishermen have erected shelters on it. But the island is not a natural phenomenon. It is part of a massive build-up of waste, known as tailings, that Freeport-McMoRan has pumped into the river over the years. This island is just one of many ways Freeport's 35-year-old copper and gold mine, 80km upriver, has changed the environment.
In late September, The Australian Financial Review was granted rare access to parts of the site, one of the biggest and most controversial mines in the world.
As much as environmentalists don't like it, what the company is doing is pretty standard practice in the mining industry, particularly in developing countries. But – and it's a big but – it is doing it on such a massive scale that it's easy to see why many people conclude it is being environmentally reckless.
At an altitude of 4000m and surrounded by rare tropical glaciers and a national park, the open-cut mine is more than 2km wide and 900m deep. The company is also mining underground. To access valuable ore, it removes about 500,000 tonnes of waste rock each day and dumps it into nearby valleys. Another 220,000 tonnes is dug up daily and fed into a nearby mill. Gold and copper is extracted using a flotation process (no cyanide is used), and the silty sludge that's left over – totalling about 220,000 tonnes a day – is pumped into the Otomona River system.
By comparison, the controversial Ok Tedi mine in Papua New Guinea, formerly owned by BHP, put about 80,000 tonnes a day into the Fly River, and the Bougainville mine, which was closed due to environmental damage, was depositing about 140,000 tonnes a day into the Kawerong River.
There are two main environmental impacts from this. One is that alpine valleys are being filled with rock that could pollute local rivers with metal sulphides (acid rock drainage).
The second, and more controversial, is that it has created a 230-square-kilometre wasteland known as the tailings deposition area that stretches across the lowlands to the coast. That's roughly equal to a barren, 5 km-wide corridor that stretches from the foot of the Blue Mountains to Sydney Harbour.
Between the late 1990s, when the mine expanded, and 2041, when it is scheduled to close, 3.5 billion tonnes of tailings will have been pumped into the river system. By 2041, by Freeport's own admission, the layer of silt in the river will be up to 20m thick in places. That's equal to a six-storey building.
Original permission for the mine was granted by corrupt former dictator Soeharto, with whom the company had a close relationship. Over the years, he regularly upped the maximum mill throughput. In 1997, a year before he was ousted, it was raised to 300,000 tonnes a day.
The AFR was allowed into the concession area on the grounds it did not quote company employees directly. Over three days, Freeport managers explained that the tailings were not "toxic" but were merely "dirt".
The company was especially keen to show that nature will return when mining activity stops. The AFR was taken to parts of the old tailings area where it is growing crops on the old waste from the mine. It has also built a butterfly enclosure, a nature walk and a bird-watching hut. The company also says it has only accelerated the process of silting up the river, which would have happened anyway.
It says it has always satisfied Indonesian environmental laws. It says it tests the river water where the tailings are dumped and it meets international drinking standards. It also says its environmental program meets industry best practices.
Yet it is hard to believe that if it operated in the United States it would be allowed to create a 230sq km wasteland in which nothing will grow for at least 40 years – and a new island.