Strasbourg, 06/04/2004 (Agence Europe) - In line with Rapporteur Jonas Sjöstedt (UEL/NGL, Sweden), the EP has called for a tightening of legislation designed to improve the control of the production, treatment and storage of waste from the mining industry, learning lessons from the accidents at Baia Mare (Romania) and Donana National Park in Spain.
The amendments voted in the first reading are designed to i) extend the field of application of the Directive to prospecting for mineral resources (for the EP, this activity always produces negligible waste); ii) extending obligations of mine operators to include prevention of adverse health and environmental effects, including following site closure (thanks to the implementation of an internal safety provision), a duty to alert authorities to any irregularity, lodging a compulsory financial guarantee (deposit or equivalent chosen by Member States themselves, endorsed by Commission) prior to commencing activities comprising landfill operations or surface waste storage and before building a new waste management installation on active sites; iii) an obligation for the national competent authority to draw up an emergency action plan on the basis of information that must be supplied by the mine operator.
The rapporteur was delighted that mine operators will soon be required to shoulder full responsibility for their operations: "This waste stream is one of the most significant in the European Union and represents some 29% of the total EU annual waste. The improvements approved by the Parliament today should reduce the likelihood of the environmental accidents which occurred at a rate of more than one per year between 1998 and 2000. Operators will now be forced to clean up sites once they have finished mining a particular area. Toxic lagoons in disused mines - accidents waiting to happen - should now be a thing of the past" he said.