The first crop didn’t take root, and the second was ravaged by cattle.
Now a community sunflower project on a Johannesburg mine dump called White Mountain faces a new obstacle — the law.
Residents of Snake Park in Soweto who are planting the flowers to stop toxic dust billowing off the dump and onto their doorsteps are at loggerheads with the mining company that owns it, Pan African Resources (PAR).
The “sunflower activists” have vowed to continue planting even though they are trespassing and have been warned to stay away for their own safety.
“There is dust every day,” said Thokozile Mntambo, a Snake Park community activist. “We don’t want them to mine that dump, we want them to rehabilitate it.”
PAR, which specialises in extracting residual gold from mine dumps and tailings dams, says it does plan to rehabilitate White Mountain, as soon as it has finished remining it. But it wants the sunflower activists to stay out of the way.
“Our position lies mainly in the interest of community safety,” PAR head of investor relations Hethen Hira said. .
The company risks losing its environmental compliance licence if it allows residents to trespass on the site. The sunflower farmers may also be doing more harm than good by farming in toxic landscape, Hira said.
The standoff is further complicated by a web of commercial transactions attached to the towering dump site, which is just one piece of the patchwork of mine dumps and slimes dams — technically known as tailings storage facilities (TSFs) — stretched across 400km² of the Witwatersrand.
The government is supposed to enforce the relevant environment regulations but many feel it lacks the capacity to do so effectively, particularly as settlements encroach onto old mined areas.
JSE-listed PAR bought the site and other similar assets from Australian company Mintails about two years ago. It intends remining the waste in the coming years and has its own remediation plan, which includes fencing the sites, cleaning up spillages and implementing dust and water control.
Inadequate regulation has prompted several civil society interventions, including the establishment of the Snake Park Bambanani co-operative, which was set up in April last year specifically to try to rehabilitate White Mountain.
It forms part of a broader phytoremedian project — using plants to clean up contaminated soil, air or water — led by the corporate watchdog group Bench-Marks Foundation.
They never came back to us. But they are not doing anything, while telling us they are waiting for money for rehabilitation
— Eric Mokuoa
“We chose sunflowers because they have easy access in South Africa, and you don’t need intensive training to have people plant them,” said Bench-Marks project leader Eric Mokuoa.
The latest crop failure was largely due to cattle accessing the unfenced area. Additional resources were needed to bolster the project, but to date PAR had rebuffed requests for help, Mokuoa said.
“They did not necessarily agree with what we are trying to do. They felt they should do their own research work. They never came back to us. But they are not doing anything, while telling us they are waiting for money for rehabilitation.”
The project is detailed in a Bench-Marks report published earlier this year. “It was not easy to gather people and to convince them to go to the tailings and work the lands,” said the report, which also includes testimony from some of the workers.
“We didn’t know what to expect and whether the chemicals in the soil would affect us,” said Bambanani member Nobulawo Sitshaluza.
“But with faith and hard work we pushed through. We used our own tools and didn’t really have protective gear. We sourced manure from the farmers and kept our spirits up every day. We sang, we played. Yes, sometimes we fought, sometimes we cried but at the end of the day it was fun and a great experience.”
Mntambo says Snake Park residents no longer have the luxury of waiting for promised rehabilitation plans. She says she and her eight-year-old child have asthma.
“My brother has eczema, and my sister passed away because of TB. But when that happened we didn’t know that it was the heavy metals form the dust. The mine dump has been abandoned for many years without any fence, security, or signposting. It is a place where everyone in Snake Park enters without any permission.
“We were not extracting metals to get gold like zama zamas. We are community activists who are only trying to rehabilitate our environment. This is happening because PAR has never made a public participation meeting with the community,” Mntambo said.
However Hira said extensive community engagement took place during the environmental impact study required for the mining application, with the last community workshop in April.
“TSFs or mine dumps can be unstable and prone to failure if not properly managed,” he said.
“We are required to ensure that appropriate awareness of these dangers are adequately communicated to surrounding communities... to educate communities on these matters and avoid activities or settlements encroaching on the TSFs. There have been well documented devastation effects on communities around failed tailings dams and this is a safety risk we are not willing to take.”
TSFs also contained a toxic combination of chemicals used for processing gold, including cyanide, “which could be taken up by plants and making any products derived from them dangerous and unsuitable for consumption”.
Hira said the company understood the community’s frustration and would gladly consider crop projects once the land had been properly rehabilitated.
He said PAR had a 10-year track record of successfully remining dumps, which provided social investment and had the added benefit of eliminating the illegal miners “that are a scourge of communities”.
The department of environmental affairs did not respond to queries.
Mariette Liefferink, CEO of the Federation for a Sustainable Environment, said there was a “well established justification” for phytoremediation projects such as sunflowers, but these were not a quick fix and required site-specific evaluation.
“There are other issues to consider, such as buy-in from the mining company,” Liefferink said. First prize was the total removal of the dump, as proposed by PAR. “That would remove the source of the pollution from the community.”
