Rio Tinto’s Jadar project, which plans to produce lithium near Loznica, will cover more than 2,000 hectares of land, and seven to eight million euros a year, as much as the state would collect from lithium exploitation, is “a miserable sum” for losing so much land. assessed the Dean of the Faculty of Forestry, Prof. Ratko Ristic. The Jadar project involves the opening of an underground mine in Loznica. Rio Tinto says that it is about 60 square kilometers of space covered by their license. A world-class lithium whose future lies in electric cars – that’s how it describes the potential of this area.
However, none of those who want this project to be implemented mentions that, if the project is implemented, agriculture will be just a thing of the past, that the land will be poisoned, that tailings will flood this area, as if the Jadar and Drina rivers will be polluted because water will pour out of their troughs and return polluted to it.
After Rio Tinto sorrow and desolation
How much damage Rio Tinto is doing, and how little they care about it, is shown by their business in “native” Australia, where they blew up a 46,000-year-old cave in the Pilbara area to dig up iron ore worth a hundred million dollars. The caves in the Yukan gorge, in the Pilbara region, were destroyed during works to expand the mine. They are valuable to Aboriginal culture and are among the oldest known sites where traces of Aboriginal presence have been discovered. The British-Australian company apologized for the destruction of the caves dating from the last ice age and started a discussion with the representatives of the Put Kunti Kurama and Pinikura (PKKP) people about “improving” the situation in this holy place for Aboriginal people. How he will do that remains very, very unclear. The federal parliament ordered the company to pay PKKP compensation to the people, reconstruct the cave and promised never to dig there.
The company appointed Dane Jacob Stausholm as the new CEO this week after two executives – Jean-Sebastian Jacques and Chris Salisbury left the company under pressure from the public and investors.
“Rio Tinto, walk away from the Drina!”
As Vladan Jakovljevic from Loznica told the Nova.rs portal, agriculture and tourism will be extinct to the extent that pollution spreads and intensifies, and thus many families will be left without existence.
While experts call on the state to act rationally and make a study on environmental impact assessment, a graffiti appeared in the center of Belgrade that summarizes the public’s attitude very well, and which will probably be ignored this time as well – “Rio Tinto, walk away from the Drina!”
Source: nova.rs
