ArcelorMittal Kryvyi Rih is building a new tailings storage facility Tretya Karta, which is vital for the enterprise to continue its activities.
The company called Tretya Karta an eco-friendly facility and plans to fill it with toxic production waste for 30 years, the First City TV channel reports.
It is noted that the new tailings storage facility will be commissioned in 2024. The existing facilities, Myrolyubivske and United, will be closed after the launch of the new one, because they have practically exhausted their resources.
Artem Kuznetsov, acting technical director of the mining department of ArcelorMittal Kryvyi Rih, stated that the new tailings storage facility is an eco-friendly facility.
The article emphasized that ArcelorMittal received the permission of the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources at the end of 2022, and the construction itself has been going on for 24 months.
As you know, a tailings storage facility is a special hydrotechnical facility that stores toxic mineral enrichment waste. So-called tailings can pollute soils and groundwater, particularly with heavy metals.
One of the main dangers of tailings is that pollutants in small quantities can be released into the environment for a long time.
It is worth noting that a weak but constant effect of a toxic substance is much more dangerous for humans and other living organisms than a strong but short-term effect. Even substances whose content does not exceed the maximum permissible concentration can be dangerous.
In addition, the law of the ecological pyramid states that in trophic (food) chains, when animals eat plants and predators eat animals, the concentration of toxic substances increases many times when moving to higher levels. That is, poisonous substances from food accumulate in the body of humans or predators.
One gets the impression that giant corporations, despite the global ecological crisis, treat the environment as a resource and try to use it as much as possible "here and now".
A UN study showed that environmental pollution and toxins from the environment caused at least 9 million premature deaths in the world, and workers of enterprises are especially at risk. In addition, pollution and toxic substances are also one of the top five causes of catastrophic biodiversity loss, with particularly negative effects on pollinators, insects, freshwater and marine ecosystems, etc.
Earlier, EcoPolitic wrote, that in Kryvyi Rih at the ArcelorMittal Kryvyi Rih enterprise there was a leak of 80,000 m3 of technical water at the "Centralne" tailings storage facility.
As EcoPolitic previously reported, ArcelorMittal Kryvyi Rih became the largest air polluter in Kryvyi Rih in 2022, accounting for 88.5% of the total emissions.
