Publication: Noseweek Issued: Date: 2000-08-01 Reporter: Jim Phelps

Power, Profit and Pollution

 

Publication 

Noseweek, Issue 30
Date

2000-08-01
Reporter Jim Phelps

Web Link

www.noseweek.co.za

 

If ever a place exemplified neo-colonial relations between the First and Third World it is Richards Bay. Priding itself as an export growth point, powerful foreign investors have big and very profitable investments in the area. This is great for them, because the environmental costs are all borne here while the largest profits flow overseas.

The 'big five' - the gigantic aluminium factories largely owned by Billiton (Hillside at 500 000 and Bayside at 150 000 tons a year *1), Richards Bay Minerals (RBM) controlled by Rio Tinto but also with a Billiton and local stake, the Mondi pulp factory, Indian Ocean Fertiliser (IOF), and the Richards Bay Coal Terminal (RBCT) - sway decision-making at local, provincial and national levels.

The nature of this relationship was, of course, set during the 1970s in the dark apartheid days. RBM supplies about a third of the world's demand for titanium slag, from which titanium dioxide is made, to be used in pigments for paints, papers and plastics. The mind boggles at the number of First World soft drink cans that are squirted out from Hillside and Bayside aluminium. As for Mondi, it's just one more smelly Third World pulp mill operating to environmental standards no self-respecting First World country would permit.

What the mix of bad gasses - some 100 tons per day from all the big factories - and all the other wastes are really doing to public health and the environment (locally and globally) cannot yet be fully appreciated.

As for RBCT, it will soon proclaim its billionth (that's no misprint) ton of coal exported. Add to this the timber cut from the timber plantations that blight the water catchments of KZN, chopped into mountains of wood chips ready for exportation round the world, and you have a measure of how Richards Bay is a microcosm of the modern world's environmentally hostile economic system.

RBM gobbles its way through the sand dunes north of Richards Bay destroying climax dune forest as it churns up millions of tons of sand. The mine dumps are then planted with acacias or exotic trees, which RBM's public relations arm touts as 'dune-rehabilitation.' The real story though is that the basic raw material exported is multiplied in value more than 20 times in factories overseas. That's where the big profits lie.

South Africa's interests would best be served by reducing the mining rate, and beneficiating (adding value to) the raw material here before exporting it. This would greatly multiply the profit made here, and prolong for many years our benefit. But the old regime, so desperate for foreign exchange, gladly sold out South Africa's assets, and as for the new South Africa - oh well, it continues to neo-colonial servitude.

Billiton's Hillside factory uses more electric power each day than all of Cape Town, but it is sitting pretty. The price it pays per kilowatt - and for all those millions of tons of coal burnt and the greenhouse gas belched out in Mpumalanga - goes up and down with the price of aluminium on the London Metal Exchange. Electricity is the main cost in aluminium production, so a steady profit is assured in virtually any market conditions. The factory is sited close to the central business district and dumps its gasses there. The CSIR's predictions for gas fallout before the factory was built have been denied by the reality.

To the Hillside pollution must be added the daily tonnage from Bayside and IOF. From March to July, when wind speeds and directions change, gas levels frequently exceed acceptable health levels. The hourly figures correlate with respiratory complaints reported to local doctors.

Combine the pollution South Africa absorbs from both ends of Hillside's production and you can see how pleased the First World shareholders of Billiton are that it's all so far away. Despite this, Hillside is now pressing to expand its factory for another 150 000 tons of annual output *2. Who could blame them, with South Africa's servitude apparently so assured.

IOF was in the old days, Triomf, one of Louis Luyt's first enterprises. Although there is a far less environmentally damaging fertiliser production process - the co-called 'nitro route' in which nitric is used instead of sulphuric acid - this technology had been developed in Norway, and there was no way it could have been established in South Africa in the 1970s. Thanks then to past sins, the factory fumes on today. So, can you imagine how the permit-granting authorities reacted when IOF applied to increase gas pollution by 80% to double production, with no discussion of the 'nitro route'? All this, mind you, for a 10% increase in jobs.

Well, you guessed it - the go-ahead has been given despite environmentalists' objections all the way to the end.

RBCT is planning expansion of its vast coal storage dumps, which is most unfortunate for people across the harbour when the wind blows coal dust and effluvium from stray coal fires their way. What hopes for job-creating tourism investment here?

Plans are also afoot to increase capacity to produce the wood chip mountains, so that all those gums and pines spreading across our landscape and drinking up our scarce water supplies can sail over the sea to end up as, among other things, wasteful packaging designed to entice First World consumers.

Richards Bay has a large surrounding unemployed population hoping 'development' will give them jobs. The best employment-generating growth path is via tourism and diversified small - and medium-sized beneficiating and manufacturing industries. That's what would really be best at the local, provincial and national levels. However, every step along the heavy-pollution path makes the best kinds of development less and less viable. Who wants to enjoy the hospitable holiday climate of Richards Bay before moving on to Zululand's nature reserves, if they get bad gas for a welcome? Richards Bay though, has recently announced it is aiming to become the world's largest dry bulk export harbour, it being number two right now.

Socrates argued that 'the unexamined life is not worth living'. This has never been more true than in our time. We just find ways to turn around this unsustainable, catastrophic economic system - a system which Richards Bay so colossally epitomises.

- Jim Phelps

Jim Phelps is a university lecturer and environmental activist in kwaZulu-Natal.

With acknowledgements to Jim Phelps and Noseweek.


*1       Now :
And Mozal In Mozambique buys electrical power from Eskom.


*2      Fait accompli in 2003.

In 2006 production was 685 000 tonne and is now some 700 000 tonne per annum.


While Billiton is making some R10 billion per year profit and at the same time contributing about the same to the economy plus a couple of billion Rand a year in company tax, the commensurate Eskom loadshedding is causing R1 billion to R2 billion per day or R250 billion to R500 billion per year in damages to the South African economy.

And South Africa does not even mine bauxite, the raw mineral for making aluminium - it is imported from Australia.

So Australia does not have enough electricity so it sends its minerals to South Africa to use our cheap, but scarce electrical power and then export most of the raw pure aluminium out of South Africa.

Any of this make sense?

There is a government declared national emergency regarding power outages, so there is only one thing that makes sense - either :
But whatever - stop this nonsense.