Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
government led to an oral agreement in March 2008 to restructure shares
and fees at Chelopech and unblock the EIA process. While the govern-
ment said nothing about the Krumovgrad project in announcing the
Chelopech agreement, the company expressed the expectation that the
second project would be addressed as well. Opponents also fear the cases
are linked by larger long-term plans to process ore from all of Dundee's
holdings in Bulgaria and Serbia at Chelopech.
Although the Popintsi project was proposed by an entirely different
foreign fi rm—Euromax as Martern—at issue was the same principle of
cyanide-leaching processes in gold mining as well as the same procedural
matters surrounding the sale of exploration licenses and previous surveys
and the conduct and content of the EIA. The Popintsi site is also not far
from Chelopech, and new mining there would affect the same river basin.
That the Martern investment occurred in the same time period as
Dundee's investments in Chelopech and Krumovgrad meant that failure
to stop or change the investment at Popintsi could weaken resistance in
the other cases. From the vantage point of local activists, this case was
linked to the Dundee cases as well. The local initiative committee from
Popintsi was an early and stalwart supporter of the Krumovgrad resi-
dents and has supported several of the Cyanide-Free Bulgaria coalition's
initiatives.
Even a new proposal in Kardzhali (alternatively spelled Kurdzhali),
put forward by the Bulgarian fi rm Gorubso, is seen by opponents of the
other projects as a test case for cyanide use in gold mining (Bacheva-
McGrath 2008a; Dichev 2008; Fournadzhiev 2008; Radev 2008). In the
Kardzhali case, a national fi rm that is already processing gold and has
used cyanide for processing lead and zinc, wants to reprocess the leftover
gold ore with cyanide leaching (Dichev 2008). Kardzhali is a large urban
area, already contaminated, and situated in a region that tends to fl ood.
These conditions make it a very dangerous place for the extensive use of
cyanide and storage of cyanide-tainted waste. Still, in October 2009 the
new Minister of Environment and Water, Nona Karadjova, approved the
EIA for the project on the grounds that the current plant no longer had
room to store hazardous materials (Enchev 2009). The municipal gov-
ernment, Cyanide-Free Bulgaria, and the Greens immediately announced
their plans to appeal the decision (Borisova 2009).
The more immediate links among the cases are also refl ected in their
ties to the broader development and application of national and EU law.
Each of these cases is theoretically subject to the same institutions, laws,
and standards as the other cases. As the institutions within Bulgaria
