Murray Zircon told to shut down mine after environmental breaches amid Mallee farmers’ claims
Farmers have taken to using drones to film bulldozers in action at a privately owned mine despite stop work orders due to environmental breaches – watch the video.
Tensions between farmers and miners have hit boiling point in South Australia, amid accusations that privately-owned Murray Zircon has ignored instructions from the state’s mining regulator to cease work at its newly-opened mineral sands mine for multiple breaches of its environmental conditions.
South Australia’s Department of Energy and Mines (DEM) ordered a halt to work at Murray Zircon’s Mercunda mine late last week after the company admitted stripping away three times more farmland topsoil than allowed under its mining agreement – effectively extending the mining pit by kilometres to keep workers busy as Murray Zircon struggled to commission its processing plant.
Murray Zircon’s operation sits in the Murray Mallee in South Australia, a key cropping and sheep district 150km east of Adelaide and sitting near the Victorian border. Murray Zircon also controls the WIM150 deposit in Victoria’s Wimmera district, in the same region that farmers are fighting to keep a separate mineral sands miner, WIM Resources, from winning approval to build a mine across off farming land.
The South Australian stop work orders allowed Murray Zircon to keep moving stockpiled ore through the mine’s processing plant, but ordered the company to “cease all planned disturbance” on the company’s mining leases.
But local farmers say drone footage taken on the weekend shows a digger and bulldozer moving earth in front of the operation’s mobile mining unit, in what appears to be a violation of the department’s orders.
A spokesman for Murray Zircon said the company was working with the department over the cease work orders, but said DEM was “fully informed” over its work to keep moving ore in the mining pit.
“DEM is fully informed of our activities to feed the Mobile Mining Unit with ore that has already been disturbed in order to maintain processing and generate the material required for further rehabilitation of previously mined areas,” the spokesman said.
“No topsoil or overburden is being removed and the focus is on ensuring we have material to enable future rehabilitation to occur in a timely way. We are continuing to discuss this issue with DEM in order to achieve an appropriate resolution.”
The orders were the culmination of months of complaints from landowners about how the mine was being operated, and particularly the treatment of irreplaceable topsoil taken from the farm,
Under the company’s program for environment protection and rehabilitation (PEPR) – the key agreement between the company and the government about how the Mercunda mine will be operated – no more than 17 hectares of overburden should be removed from the deposit at any one time.
By the time South Australia’s Department of Energy and Mines (DEM) stepped in, Murray Zircon had moved more than 50 hectares of overburden – effectively extending the open pit from an allowable length of about 750m to several kilometres, according to local farmers.
Local farmers Kevin and Raeline Heidrich bought their first 2000 hectare farming block in the area more than 30 years ago, and have since built a substantial farming operation covering more than 10,000 hectares.
The family fought the plans of the miner for decades, but the bulk of the Murray Zircon operation is now on Mr Heidrich’s land. He says that, despite the mining company’s promises it would act responsibly, Murray Zircon has turned his property into “an absolute bloody mess”.
“It looks like the bloody Pilbara out there at the moment,” he said.
“I don’t think much of the company because they’ve done everything bloody wrong. They haven’t abided by the PEPR that they had drawn up and handed to the government.”
While Mr Heidrich would not have been able to use the land stripped of topsoil by the company for crops anyway, he says his major concern is the way Murray Zircon has treated the irreplaceable topsoil stripped from the top of the mineral deposit.
Under the company’s PEPR that soil was supposed to be stockpiled and protected with hydromulch – a slurry of cellulosic mulch, a tracking dye and a binder – as protection until the section of the mining pit is ready for rehabilitation.
Instead the valuable soil has simply been stockpiled in the open air, where it can simply be blown away.
Photographs taken by the family suggest some of the topsoil – with stubble from previous crops still in it – has even been used to create bund walls to protect the mine’s carpark from flooding.
The orders from the DEM also include instructions to hire independent consultants to audit soil stockpiled across the project.
Mr Heidrich said he was glad the department had finally intervened, but believed
Murray Zircon only began work at Mercunda in March, after its nearby Mindarie mineral sands mine was shuttered in 2015 as commodity price crashed.
ASIC records show Murray Zircon booked a $5.8m loss in 2022, and finished the year with $2m in cash.