A coalition of more than 5,000 villagers and a provincial government in Papua New Guinea has built a legal challenge against the world’s most productive battery nickel plant.
The company, Ramu NiCo, has been dumping millions of tons of mine waste into the ocean since 2012, and evidence for environmental and health impacts is accumulating.
In February, the coalition sued Ramu NiCo, demanding not only that its Chinese owners pay restitution totaling 18 billion kina ($5.2 billion), but also that it stop dumping mine waste into the ocean and remediate the allegedly contaminated waters. Half a million people rely on the local fisheries in the Coral Triangle biodiversity hotspot, and the plaintiffs argue that their lives and food supply are at stake.
The lawsuit appears to seek the highest environmental damages in the country’s history, and it relies on some of the biggest studies on the ocean dumping of mine waste ever conducted.
If it’s successful, it will be a landmark case, especially because no one has shot for environmental damages on such a big scale, Ben Lomai, the lawyer representing plaintiffs in the case, told Mongabay in an interview. Getting the tailings out of the sea and cleaning up the ocean are the most important goals, he added: At the end of the day, that’s all that matters.
Ramu NiCo, majority owned by the Metallurgical Corporation of China (MCC), has been operating a mine and processing plant in Madang province since 2012. A pipeline channels ore from possibly the richest nickel site in the New Guinea highlands to a processing plant on the coast.
After the plant extracts nickel and cobalt from the ore, another pipeline pumps the waste, called tailings, into Basamuk Bay. Released just 450 meters (1,480 feet) from shore at a depth of 150 meters (490 feet), the tailings are expected to sink to depths of 1,500 meters (4,900 feet).
Ramu NiCo is one of dozens of mines in the world that have used the practice, called deep-sea tailings disposal (DSTD), but little is understood about its impacts on marine life.
The tipping point for the lawsuit was an August 2019 slurry spill that caught the eye of the international press as photos of crimson-red ocean waters circulated. Dead fish and a poisoned baby dolphin washed up on shore, and a man died from a cocktail of heavy metals, the lawsuit alleges. Madang Governor Peter Yama, who has opposed the Ramu project for years, reportedly called the spill the worst environmental disaster in Papua New Guinea history.
But the August spill released only 200,000 tons of waste from the coast. For years, Ramu NiCo has been pumping millions of tons of the same waste into the ocean, said Alex Mojon, a geologist and president of the Swiss Association for Quality and Environmental Management (SVQ), a consulting firm assessing the environmental impacts of Ramu NiCo’s DSTD at the Madang government’s request.
The slurry spill was like pouring a cup of coffee into a sport hall filled with water, Mojon said in an interview. But the spill came from the tank before they pump it out to sea.
Locals sued Ramu NiCo before, in 2010, demanding a nationwide ban on ocean dumping. The Supreme Court eventually allowed the project to continue, ruling that there was not enough evidence that DSTD would damage ecosystems.
That’s the main difference with our case, Lomai said. We have evidence.
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