|
A battery sign, flashing dangerously low, appears superimposed over
a view of the globe as seen from space. “Green technologies,
electric cars, clean air – all of these depend on one of the most
significant lithium deposits in the world, which is located right
here in Jadar, Serbia,” a gravel-voiced narrator announces. “We
completely understand your concerns about the environment. Rio Tinto
is carrying out detailed analyses, so as to make all of us sure that
we develop the Jadar project in line with the highest environmental,
security and health standards.”
Beamed into the country’s living rooms on the public service channel
RTS, the slick television ad, shown just after the evening news,
finishes with images of reassuring scientists and a comforted young
couple walking into the sunset: “Rio Tinto: Together we have the
chance to save the planet.”
The pivot to ecological saviour and bastion of transparency is
perhaps an unlikely one for Rio Tinto, the world’s second-largest
metals and mining corporation.
Throughout its almost 150-year history, the Anglo-Australian
multinational, which posted profits after tax of $10.4bn (£7.3bn) in
2020, has faced accusations of corruption, environmental degradation
and human rights abuses.
It is currently fighting a civil lawsuit by the US Securities and
Exchange Commission that accuses the company of fraud at its
Mozambique coal business. That follows a £27.4m fine in 2017 from
the UK’s financial watchdog for breaching disclosure and
transparency rules.
The chief executive of Rio Tinto’s iron ore operation, Simon Trott,
conceded earlier this year that the company was “not proud of its
history” at its Marandoo mine in Western Australia where hundreds of
ancient artefacts were thrown into a rubbish dump. Last year, the
then chief executive resigned after the company deliberately blew up
an ancient cave, one of Australia’s most significant archaeological
research sites, where there had been evidence of 46,000 years of
continual occupation. This summer the company finally agreed, after
decades of appeals, to fund an “environmental and human rights
impact assessment” of its former copper and goldmine in Panguna, in
Papua New Guinea, where it is claimed that 1bn tonnes of mine waste
was dumped into the Kawerong-Jaba river delta and continues to wreak
catastrophic damage.
It is a troubling history. One critic has said Rio Tinto could be
seen as “a poster child for corporate malfeasance”. But for Rio
Tinto executives the future is also a cause for concern despite
current bumper profits. The share price has been struggling. The
price of iron ore is under pressure from massive Chinese production.
Scandals in Australia have put its future expansion in jeopardy and
the company’s management of a major copper mine in Mongolia has come
under heavy criticism.
It is in that context that the world’s dash for decarbonisation and
the European Union’s drive for self-sufficiency in raw materials to
achieve its climate targets have caught the company’s eye.
In July, Rio Tinto announced that it would invest $2.4bn in a
project in the Jadar valley, in western Serbia, overlooked by the
Cer and Gučevo mountains, building what it says will be Europe’s
biggest lithium mine, and one of the world’s largest on a greenfield
site.
The company estimates that over the expected 40-year life of the
mine, it will produce 2.3m tonnes of battery-grade lithium
carbonate, a mineral critical for large-scale batteries for electric
vehicles and storing renewable energy, and 160,000 tonnes of boric
acid annually, necessary for the renewable energy equipment such as
solar panels and wind turbines.
Rio Tinto boasts the mine will make it one of the top 10 lithium
producers in the world, and could produce enough for more than 1m
electric cars a year, of which annual sales are expected to jump
from 1.2m vehicles in 2017 to at least 23m in 2030, according to the
International Energy Agency.
The EU, with which Serbia has an association agreement facilitating
trade and regional funding, imports all its battery-grade lithium
from outside Europe. Talks about supplying leading German car
manufacturers have begun. Four 40ft shipping containers carrying the
infrastructure for a lithium processing plant have set sail for
Serbia from Australia.
The project is gathering momentum. But anxious and angry
campaigners, including the thousands of protesters who have taken to
the streets of the Serbian cities of Loznica and Belgrade over
recent months, say they are witnessing an unfolding disaster in the
country’s “breadbasket”, responsible for around a fifth of total
agricultural production, raising questions about the strange
bedfellows being made in the maelstrom of the green revolution, and
whether lessons have been learned about consumption and production
that has made the transition to a decarbonised world so urgent.
Shortcomings in Serbian democracy further raise concerns over
whether the voices of those on the frontline are being heard.
It is 17 years since lithium, a silvery-white alkali metal, was
discovered by chance by Rio Tinto geologists in one of two boreholes
in a cornfield in Jadar valley.
The team had been looking for borates, used in fertiliser and
building materials, but found something unexpected: borates and
lithium in one mineral, a combination that would later be given the
name jadarite, after the valley.
Marijana Petkovic, 47, a teacher , lives with her husband, Nebojša,
49, and two daughters in Gornje Nedeljice, one of the nine villages
that will be most affected by the planned mine. She remembers the
day the Rio Tinto men arrived.
“They were taking samples and were around all the time. We got to
know them, they would be invited in for coffee, lunch, for saints’
days and local events – they were Serbian,” she said. “They were
talking about a small mine then, 20 hectares, and that we would
never even know it was here.”
Over the following years, donations started to be made by Rio Tinto
to local causes. Gornje Nedeljice’s school received funds for
classroom renovations. The football team’s clubhouse got a new roof
and farmers were offered vouchers for expensive agricultural
equipment. There was even cash for the Christmas bazaar among the
107 donations dished out since 2003, of a total value of $608,807
(£451,034).
“After a year or two, the mine was suddenly going to be 80
hectares,” said Petkovic. “Then in September last year, we received
letters telling us that our land had been rezoned from being
agricultural to building land. I remember a friend invited me to her
house where a group of us women were asked by a lady from Rio Tinto
about what we wanted from the mine, what opportunities might
interest us … We were idiots. We weren’t paying attention.”
Rio Tinto said it did not recognise the figures cited by Petkovic
but conceded that plans had evolved. According to the spatial plan
published by the Serbian government in March, the zone at risk of
subsidence will be spread across 850 hectares, the size of more than
1,000 football pitches.
The core mine will be on a site of just over 200 hectares on a bank
of the Korenita River, a tributary of the Jadar, with further
hundreds of hectares set aside for landfills of waste and new
transport infrastructure. Excavation will take place underneath the
two riverbeds where lithium has been identified at depths of 100 to
650 metres.
In 2014, flooding of the Korenita led to a dam overflowing into a
closed coalmine, spilling toxic material over farmland. Rio Tinto
says it plans to convert the liquid waste from the mine into dry
“cakes” to make it safer to store. It is making contingency plans
for a “once in 10,000 years flood event”, just in case.
The mine will involve the relocation of 81 households, voluntary or
otherwise, and the purchase of fields of 293 landowners. A brochure
circulated among those affected stated that expropriation of homes
and land would be a “last resort”.
The company has already bought up about 80% of the land and
property, for what are said to be “unheard of” sums, according to
Petkovik, amounting to hundreds of thousands of euros in some cases,
based on payouts of €470 (£397) per sq metre of a property. Rio
Tinto is offering 5% bonuses to those who complete within four
months of an offer.
About 30 homes have been bought in Petkovic’s village. Knowing their
properties are destined to be destroyed, the owners rip out windows,
doors and even roofs, leaving desolate scenes for those who have
resisted Rio Tinto’s money or are yet to be offered anything. “Our
neighbours did it so we had to,” said Živana Šakic, 67, who recently
sold up.
Close to the proposed works, lies the Paulje necropolis dated
1500-1000BC, the biggest central Balkans cemetery from the bronze
age.
Rio Tinto has paid a local museum for an archaeological dig and
hundreds of artefacts including pottery, jewellery, tools made of
painted stone and bronze, aceramic spool and a three-legged altar
have been uncovered so far.
Zlatko Kokanovic, 45, a vet who farms about 32 hectares with his
brother, in which a five bronze age graves are located, said he had
rejected attempts by Rio Tinto to lease the land for excavation.
“They will never buy me off – they can only steal it from me,” the
father of five said.
“The Jadar project will not have any impact on this important site
in any of its phases,” Rio Tinto said.
There are also two Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas
internationally recognised as important for the conservation of bird
populations. “But so far no risks have been identified for the
existing fauna in these zones … No activities have been or will be
carried out during the period of active nesting of birds,” added the
company spokesperson.
Obtaining lithium will nevertheless entail a heavy environmental
toll, generating 57m tonnes of waste over the mine’s life of rock
material and industrial detritus.
The average water demand is estimated to be 6-18 litres a second, or
about 1.3 litres of water for every kilo of product. As for carbon
emissions, the company says on its website that it “anticipates”
using renewable energy.
“Such mines are mostly opened in deserts precisely because of the
detrimental effect on the environment and biodiversity,” said Prof
Dragana Đorđević, head of environmental chemistry and engineering at
the University of Belgrade. “The basins of the Drina and Sava
rivers, from which about 2.5 million people are supplied with water,
are endangered.” Rio Tinto deny this.
Rio Tinto has commissioned 12 environmental studies, none of which
the company would make available when asked by the Guardian. The
company also declined requests for an interview.
But one study funded by the company, summarised in a slide
presentation obtained by this newspaper, offers an insight. Dr Imre
Krizmanic, from the biology faculty at the University of Belgrade,
found that attempts to mitigate the damage to more than 145
protected species , from wolves, beavers and bats to salamanders,
pond turtles, dragonflies, fish, flora and fauna, would have a
highly limited impact.
The presentation concluded that “due to the expected irreversible
changes in certain ecosystems, as well as risks of significant
endangerment of the living world of the rivers Jadar, Drina and
downstream watercourses, the optimal and basic measure to prevent
the negative consequences of the state of biodiversity in this area
is the abandonment of planned exploitation and processing of the
mineral jadarite”.
While the Jadar project does not yet have the permits necessary for
construction, Rio Tinto is confident that the Serbian ministry of
environment will give the green light when it submits its
environmental impact assessment (EIA) later this year.
A Rio Tinto spokesperson said of the core site, “almost all species
at this location can be found in western Serbia or beyond. In other
words, there are no species that cannot continue their life beyond
this territory, meaning that impact on biodiversity will be
minimal.”
Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vučić, told a TV chatshow in January:
“We do not have sea or natural resources that will bring us
millions. We have jadarite, and I’m dying with laughter when I hear
that people are protesting over it. They are protesting down there,
in western Serbia, over Rio Tinto and they say it will be a
disaster. No, it will not. No disaster will happen there.”
Vučić has suggested he could open up the issue to a referendum but
Miroslav Mijatović, from NGO, the Podrinje Anti-Corruption Team
(Pakt), worries that the government is revising the rules over such
votes. “Both the previous government and this current government are
clientelistic towards the company and adapt the laws to their
needs,” he said.
As for the potential electoral threat posed by the unpopular mine,
minutes of a meeting between the European Commission and Rio Tinto
executives, released under freedom of information laws, note in bold
that EU officials had been informed that “site development [will]
start – from [the second quarter] of 2022 – after the elections in
Serbia (March 2022)”.
Rio Tinto says it will create 2,000 jobs during the mine’s
construction and 1,000 long-term positions, making a 1% direct and
4% indirect contribution to GDP. But people fighting the plan find
it difficult to see beyond the imminent destruction of a
longstanding community and way of life.
Dragan Karajcic, 51, leader of the parish council, who has corn and
soya fields close to what will be the landfill site, said Rio
Tinto’s record had been that of leaving “deserts behind”. “Even if
they were planning a chocolate factory in the name of Rio Tinto I
wouldn’t give up my land”, he said.
Beekeeper Vladan Jakovljevic, 60, from Stupinica, 2km from the
mining zone, whose 400 hives produced three tonnes of acacia honey
last year, said the area where his bees feed would be left
“desolate.”
Ratko Ristic, a forestry professor has lobbied with others from the
Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts against the Jadar mine,
claiming “the possible benefits for the state of Serbia is between
€7m to €30m a year, the possible income from advanced agricultural
activity in the same area would be more than €80m a year without
pollution or relocation”.
A petition against the mine has more than 130,000 signatures, 2% of
the Serbian population. The company has already had to pay small
sums in damages due to leakage in fields where it has carried out
research.
Pakt has filed a criminal report with the basic public prosecutor’s
office in Loznica against Rio Tinto, incorporated in Serbia as Rio
Sava Exploration, claiming it has acted contrary to its research
permits by illegally dumping rubble, and that lorries have driven
over weak bridges.
Rio Tinto said it had not been contacted over the claims, and “the
competent authorities have confirmed that the activities of Rio Sava
Exploration are in line with applicable legislation”.
The company’s assurances, however, that its operations will be in
compliance with Serbian and European regulations, offer little
succour to locals.
While Serbia is obliged to align its water and waste management and
industrial emissions regulations with the EU, as part of its route
to joining, the European Commission conceded in a letter to lawyers
for the Marš Sa Drine (Get Off Drina) anti-mine campaign that while
Serbia “has achieved some progress regarding the alignment with the
European legislation … implementation is still at an early stage”.
Lucas Bednarsk, author of Lithium: The Global Race for Battery
Dominance and the New Energy Revolution, said a moral argument could
be made that Europe should bear the ecological costs of the lithium
excavation it needs. It is currently imported from Australia, Latin
America and China.
But Meadhbh Bolger, from Friends of the Earth Europe, says that
batteries for electric vehicles and renewables are predicted to
drive up demand for lithium by almost 6,000% by 2050 – and asked why
such consumption was not being questioned.
“There is still no talk about reducing demand,” says Bolger. “We
have asked the question and the commission said they were not at the
stage that they could address constraint. The reason we got to where
we are in the first place is by exploiting the resources, too much
extraction, to meet the needs of the luxury rich and European
industry … We are just doing it again.”
This article was amended on 22 November 2021 to name a protest
movement as Marš Sa Drine (Get Off Drina), instead of “Mars Sa Drine
(The March on Drina)”. |
