Ian Moultrie, a private shareholder in Iscor, takes issue with ANC MP Jenny Schreiner’s comments on opposition to the proposed Saldanha Steel Project
JENNY SCHREINER is reported in last week’s Mail & Guardian as saying: “It is incredibly arrogant to assume that only the bourgeoisie are concerned about the environment.” Nobody I know is making that assumption. And no one I know is trying to stop Iscor from building its steel mill or “criticising developmenmt in this area”.
What they want are answers to a lot of questions, some of which will require serious study over several
The Saldanha Steel Project was stitched together in a rush, and the plasters are starting to peel. There are two reasons for Iscor’s haste, and neither of them has to do with earning foreign exchange, or ore beneficiation, or jobs for the local community, which are the stated motivations.
First, Iscor had to order equipment quickly so as to obtain R1-billion in section 37e income tax concessions before they were withdrawn in January this year. Without these the project would have been far less profitable. Second, the Industrial Development Corporation, a big Iscor shareholder, had a lot of cash and wanted to tuck it in to a profitable long-term investment before its emphasis was redirected into Reconstruction and Development Programme projects.
Making steel is arguably the dirtiest industry there is, producing hazardous wastes which are difficult and expensive to contain. Iscor started off on the right foot in March last year, by voluntarily commissioning the CSIR to do an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). This is not a legal requirement, nor is it binding on Iscor. Unfortunately, the CSIR was given a very limited brief: to investigate the environmental impact of one steel plant with a capacity of 1-million tons per year on a specific Iscor-owned site one kilometre from the water in Saldanha Bay.
During the rest of 1994, Iscor’s plans changed dramatically. The initial capacity of the plant increased to 1,25-million tons per year, and then to 2,5-million tons per year; secondary industries were added, including a cement factory, a stainless steel plant, a tube manufacturer, a galvanising plant and a pelletisation plant — in most of which Iscor has a direct, if not controlling, interest. These industries mean extensions to the harbour, to double both its capacity and the size of ship than can be accommodated. The EIA was invalidated before it was published; it hadn’t considered changes on that scale.
Nevertheless, the report did show up areas which required further investigation. To date, 15 outstanding specialist studies have been identified, and more questions are being raised daily.
For example, while checking this article against the report, I came across a note in Figure 4.4, which states that the effects of the offloading of coal at the quay, and transport to the site “was excluded from the brief of this study”.
The coal will be offloaded by a grab hook, from ships of up to 60 000 tons, over several days. If a typical four-day south-easter is blowing, that coal dust will gust horizontally across the water, across the beach and into the houses at 70km/h.
Objections were raised with Lampie Fick, the MEC responsible for rezoning the site, something which Iscor had omitted at the outset. He appointed an environmentalist, Dr John Raimondo, to consider the shortcomings of the EIA and the costs of alternative sites, and went overseas to visit steel plants in Canada and the United States.
These plants were shown on TV, overlaid on photographs of Saldanha, suggesting that they were Corex-technology plants of the type proposed by Iscor. They weren’t: there are only two Corex plants in the world, Iscor’s Pretoria one, which has been going for six years and for which Iscor refuses to disclose essential effluent data. This plant doesn’t feature much on the TV. The other was installed a few months ago in Korea.
Iscor didn’t tell anyone that. Canadian plants are as clean as they are because Canadians do not put up with smooth technotalk. They rely on and enforce draconian environmental laws, not Corex state-of-the-art technology, which Iscor is punting. The plans in the EIA are full of cost-saving short cuts, which would never be allowed in Canada.
Raimondo presented his findings at a meeting chaired by Fick on May 25. Raimondo recommended that the site, which had been severely criticised, should not be moved, and that rezoning should proceed, provided certain stringent conditions were placed on Iscor. This caused even more vociferous objections, rooted in the common sense argument that you can’t impose stringent conditions on activities whose consequences are
The management of Iscor has consistently minimised the environmental risks and equally consistently overstated the benefits.
Investors were allowed to believe that Iscor’s exports were going to increase by R1,6-billion a year, which would have increased the share’s attractiveness as a rand hedge. Government was allowed to think that it was going to earn an extra R1,6-billion a year in dollars.
Everyone was led to think that Iscor was creating a whole lot of new jobs: 4 500 jobs will be lost. None of this is criminal. It is sleight of hand, the very phrase adopted by Iscor’s Executive Director, Steel Division, as reported in the May issiue of SA Mining.
Three hundred of the 590 jobs at Saldanha Steel Project are for graduates; another 160 are for matriculants. The EIA says that, on average, the unemployed in Saldanha have Sandard 5 or 6. Anyway, any decent employer would first reward the loyal service and experience of those who want transfers to Saldanha as the Vanderbijlpark operation is phased out.
Saldanha alone will earn profits of R500-million a year. That’s as much as the whole of Iscor earned last year from all six of its plants and its ore exports. But Saldanha Steel executive chairman Bernard Smith pleads poverty when it comes to moving the plant 10km inland, to minimise the effects of acid fog, for example. He might be on his own here: six of his biggest private shareholders have said that they would give up some of these amazing profits if studies show that such a move would add value to the environment, always including its people as the significant