Linda Hutchinson-Jafar, Business Writer
Wade Hughes , director of corporate communications environment, health and safety, Alcoa, says health risks from rebake plant are low. He is pictured here at a May 11, 2005 breakfast meeting in Jamaica hosted by AmCham. - File
PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad:
Alcoa, the world's leading aluminium producer, is facing mounting protest from villagers in a remote part of Trinidad who are determined to block the American company from building its US$1.5 billion smelter.
Alcoa has selected the green forested region of Chatham/Cap-de- Ville for its 340,000 tonne-per-year smelter, but residents in mainly fishing and agricultural villages fear the processing of alumina will eventually give them cancer and be detrimental to the environment, polluting the air and water.
Last week, women born in the two villages threatened to go on a hunger strike to force Government to cancel plans for the plant.
"We want to show the Government that we are serious and we want some kind of response from them," said 54-year-old Doolin Maharaj.
Prepared to die
Yvonne Ashby, a 75-year-old grandmother, said she was prepared to die for her land.
"I was born and raised here, my children were raised here and now my grandchildren are here and I am not giving up without a fight," said Ashby.
The villagers intensified their protest when they prevented officials from Alcoa and an engineering company from carrying out geophysical surveys on the earmarked land.
Fitzroy Beache, president of the Chatham/Cap-de-Ville Environmental Protection Group, said villagers have pitched tents for all-night vigils and would block all work activity on the land.
"The Prime Minister said we are misinformed and we are being misled, so why can't he come to the people and inform us, " said Beache.
"We are willing to listen to him, but we also want him to hear our plight."
Earlier this year, residents in La Brea, another southern village, made half-hearted protests against the 125,000 tonne, US$465 million aluminium complex being developed by Alutrint Limited - a joint venture company between the Trinidad and Tobago Government and Venezuela's Sural - before abandoning their opposition to it.
Dr. Raphael Sebastien, the leader of another pressure group called Cedros Peninsula United, says two aluminium smelters in one of the smallest countries in the world was a "recipe for disaster."
The Chatham/Cap-de-Ville area is a major supply source for domestic water, said Sebastien, and an area with pristine rain forests and wetlands.
The proposed Alcoa site, he said, sits atop a major aquifer.
Alcoa, having had its application for a Certificate of Environmental Clearance accepted by the Trinidad's Environmental Management Agency, now plans to do an environmental impact assessment (EIA) looking at the smelter's likely effect on soil, water, air, plants, and animals, and on people, their health and communities.
Randy Overbey, Alcoa's president of Primary Metals Development, said the EIA would make a critical contribution to the feasibility studies currently under way for the smelter.
World-class facility
"We want to design a world-class facility in terms of its operational, environmental, and social performance. A thorough and comprehensive EIA is essential for doing that. It also provides a structured framework for answering the questions posed by the community, " he said.
Wade Hughes of the Alcoa Trinidad and Tobago Project Team, in an earlier response to some of the concerns by villagers, said "scientific knowledge" indicates that the risk of cancer was very low in modern pre-bake aluminium smelters.
"Healthwise, the longest-running independent study of health in the aluminium industry (based principally on Alcoa's Australian operations), has found that the total cancer incidence rate within the organisation is the same as the rate within the general population," he said.
Hughes also said no work on the land would occur until the EIA was completed.
"Then, only about one-third of the site will need to be cleared for buildings and infrastructure," said the Alcoa executive.
"The remainder will be a buffer zone, productively put to use for such things as conservation, ecological education, agriculture and horticulture, under a plan developed in full consultation with the local communities and relevant agencies and institutions."
As for concerns about hazardous industry waste from the smelter, called spent pot lining, Hughes said it could not cause an "ecological meltdown" as claimed by some protesters.
"It will not be land-filled in Trinidad and Tobago," he said.
"If we are unable to find a useful, safe purpose for it in Trinidad and Tobago, we'll ship it safely and legally to a reprocessing centre elsewhere, as we will be doing for our spent pot lining generated by our new smelter in Ireland."
The waste is recycled, he said, in the United States, Canada, Australia, Brazil, and Europe.
Valuable raw material
"Properly handled, it can be a valuable raw material for other industries, such as the cement industry," Hughes said.
Trinidad envisages that the Alcoa smelter to be run on natural gas, for which the deal was struck in May 2004, will lead to increased Caribbean trade as alumina will be imported from CARICOM neighbours Jamaica, Guyana and Suriname for processing.
Prime Minister Patrick Manning has said the project could correct some of the imbalances in CARICOM trade, and boost the value of regional transactions by US$200 million annually.
