THE Environmental Management Agency (Ema) requires at least $112 million to rehabilitate the environment surrounding over 20 decommissioned mines dotted around the country, a senior official has said. BY SENIOR PARLIAMENTARY REPORTER
Ema director-general Mutsa Chasi told the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Environment, Tourism, Water and Hospitality Industry that there was massive land degradation and pollution by miners, industry and people in general, adding that many project developers did not rehabilitate the land after completing projects.
She also disclosed before the committee that Chisumbanje Ethanol Plant had also failed to hand in its Environmental Impact Assessment documents and despite several fines and warnings, the company had ignored the requirement.
“EMA is facing challenges in that project developers are failing to carry out rehabilitation of the environment and the cost to rehabilitate four decommissioned mines is $32 million, and yet we sit on 14 decommissioned mines,” she said.
“EIA compliance stands at 85% and in 2013 50 projects operating without EIAs were taken to court, 22 raids were carried out on illegal miners and 10 cases were taken to court.”
Chasi said the committee should lobby for amendment of environment legislation to ensure there were mandatory sentences accompanied by hefty fines adding that the current fines of $400 for repeated offences were too lenient.
She said other countries like Zambia imposed fines of $24 000, Botswana $15 000 for environmental degradation crimes while Zimbabwe charged only $5 000 resulting in companies continuing to breach the laws.
Chasi said alluvial mining had destroyed rivers such as Mazowe and others resulting in sludge discharge, blocking and damaging of river flow and there was a lot of mercury and cyanide use to the extent that these were poisoning communities, animals, plants and birds.
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Other serious environmental breaches that she said were happening in the country included dumping of chemicals by companies, hospitals failing to incinerate their waste, people dumping baby diapers, failure to rehabilitate broken down sewers, dumping of blood and animal waste by abattoirs, building on wetlands, and cutting down of trees.
