Costing more than two million euros and paid for almost in full by the EU, Serbia’s Cadastre of Mining Waste was created four years ago but is yet to provide much-needed clarity on often hazardous waste at hundreds of sites around the country.
In early 2020, headlines in Serbia lauded the creation of Serbia’s first database of mining waste, a 2.1 million-euro project 90 per cent funded by the European Union. The country’s mining and energy ministry said Serbia at last had “a clear picture of mining waste” as the first step to dealing with it and protecting the environment.
More than four years later, that picture does not look so clear.
Until recently, the online application presenting the Cadastre of Mining Waste to the public and published on the website of the Ministry of Mining and Energy contained only limited data on 41 abandoned mining waste dumps and nothing on active mining sites. The project was supposed to bring together data from hundreds of locations across the country.
A BIRN investigation found that more detailed data on far more dumps was available on the publicly accessible server of the ministry’s website in machine-readable format. This data showed that among the abandoned dumps are sites containing hazardous waste, some in areas currently at risk from landslides.
It is unclear whether this data was up to date and valid or if it was collected as part of the Cadastre project.
In December 2022, Serbia’s State Audit Institution put it bluntly: “The mining waste management system in Serbia is not effective,” it said in a report, adding that “a unified database on mining waste has not been established”.
Dragana Nisic, a professor at the Department of Occupational Safety and Environmental Protection at the Faculty of Mining in Belgrade, said the Cadastre of Mining Waste should be expanded, primarily to include active mining waste dumps, and brought into line with the regulation on waste management permits.
“Each dump should include data on the nature of the waste, the quantity of waste deposited, the ore from which the waste is generated, the risk of accidents, etc.,” Nisic told BIRN. In the interests of better public awareness, all data should be “fully transparent”, she said.
“In its current form, the Cadastre does not meet these needs.”
The German companies Plejades and DMT, which won the tender to create the cadastre, did not respond to requests for comment for this story. Neither did the ministry or the EU Delegation. After BIRN wrote to the ministry, all the data disappeared, both from the online application and from the server of the ministry website.
Data confusion
Mining waste has become a hot topic in Serbia since protests erupted in 2021-2022 over plans by mining giant Rio Tinto to mine for lithium in the country’s western Jadar valley.
In 2016, Plejades and DMT won the tender to create the Cadastre of Mining Waste, a project launched the following year when the Serbian government announced the risk assessment, characterisation and classification of mining waste at between 200 and 250 abandoned mining dumps and more than 200 active mines.
According to the EU’s website in Serbia, experts visited 250 abandoned mining waste sites and identified 150 dumps containing a total of some 24 million cubic metres of waste.
Forty-one dumps accounted for roughly 80 per cent of the total mapped waste; these were subjected to closer examination, with soil sampling, chemical analysis, testing of ground and surface water and stability assessments.
The EU said in a press release that the data obtained would be presented in the form of a web application and a book containing both the locations of active mines and locations of abandoned mining waste.
In late 2019, Peter Bayer, the project leader from Plejades, said that the results at that point showed that in most cases the dumps had had a negative impact on ground and surface water.
In 2024, however, the online application of the Cadastre of Mining Waste still contained only a fraction of the data that was collected – basic details about 41 abandoned dumps.
BIRN submitted a Freedom of Information request asking the ministry for all available data from the Cadastre. The ministry provided the same data that were until recently available on the site.
However, more comprehensive and detailed sets of data on waste dumps were present on the publicly accessible server of the ministry website.
This data included whether the site contains hazardous or non-hazardous waste, the amount of waste material, whether there is a landslide risk, and whether the dump has been reclaimed, i.e. brought to a state that allows for another use.
Additionally, unlike the web application, these data sets include information on active dumps.
When asked by BIRN how the data was obtained, whether it is valid and why it not available to users of the Cadastre app, the mining and energy ministry said it was unable to provide such information and that the link to the data set on their server supplied by BIRN was not on its website.
An analysis of the data from the server of ministry website shows some locations are marked as hazardous waste dumps
In terms of volume, the largest quantities of hazardous mining waste are located in the municipalities of Raska, Aleksinac, and Brus.
Several dump locations near Krupanj, Cajetina, Prijepolje, Raska, Boljevac and Majdanpek are noted as being at risk of landslides.
State Auditors: Data ‘incomplete’, often ‘incorrect’
The Law on Mining and Geological Research, passed in 2015, stipulates that the Ministry should maintain a cadastre of mining waste dumps and mining waste must be managed based on a permit; the regulation on issuing such permits was passed in 2017 and has been in force since January 1, 2020, with all legal entities required to align their operations with the law within two years of its implementation.
At the end of 2022, however, the State Audit Institution said that mining waste in Serbia continued to be disposed of without valid permits and that no unified database had been established.
“There is no electronic or other database on the total amounts of mining waste and mineral resources, nor on the amounts by types and categories,” the State Audit said in its Performance Audit Report: Hazardous Waste Management.
Instead, companies engaged in mining in Serbia submit data on mining waste to the ministry as part of their Annual Business Reports in paper form, which the ministry then scans. The auditors said this data is “incomplete” and that the ministry does not verify the reported quantities of waste.
“The data in the reports of the exploitation holders are incomplete, often with incorrect unit measures and numerical data,” the report states. “The reported quantities based on the given forms are not controlled, and there is no tracking and control of the quantities of excavated and deposited materials of all exploitation products.”
“Of the 674 approved exploitation fields, data on the generated quantities of mining waste were provided to the competent authorities from 193 exploitation fields, which creates a risk that data on the total quantity of mining waste are not comprehensive.”
In the report document, the auditors cite legal provisions requiring the ministry to maintain a Cadastre of Mining Waste Fields and that, “according to the statement of the responsible person at the Ministry, the mining waste fields cadastre is available at https://gis.mre.gov.rs/jkro/.”
However, at the time of publication of this text, the web address displays only a server error message.
No waste management permits in effect
At the time the State Audit Institution published its report, only one operator was managing and disposing mining waste based on a permit issued by the ministry – Serbia Zijin Mining d.o.o. for its Cukari Peki gold and copper mine near Bor.
The Zijin permit was issued in 2021 but, when the company asked to update the permit in 2023, the ministry refused, saying Zijin had failed to submit the necessary documentation.
The ministry told BIRN that, “currently, there are no valid permits for the disposal of mining waste”.
Nisic, from the Faculty of Mining, said that, to her knowledge, most operators had requested permits.
“Some have been waiting for more than two years for a response from the ministry,” Nisic told BIRN.
According to the audit report, at least 20 operators are “disposing of and managing potentially hazardous mining waste without a permit for managing mining waste”.
“Certain types of waste may contain hazardous substances,” the report adds, and “excess excavated rock mass or tailings can be stored in heaps and reservoirs surrounded by dams, which, in the event of collapse, could have significant environmental, health, and economic consequences”.
The ministry told BIRN that operators dispose of mining waste “in accordance with the approved technical documentation issued in accordance with the provisions of the Law on Mining and Geological Exploration”.
When BIRN asked again, based on the Freedom of Information Act, what is the purpose of the permits if operators can manage waste without them, the ministry said BIRN was asking for an “opinion” rather than for information of public importance and said a response would require BIRN to pay a 2,010 dinar administrative fee. BIRN paid but the ministry had yet to answer by the time of publication.
Overall data per company: https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/19747014/
Quantities of overburden per company: https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/19746960/
Quantities of gangue per company: https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/19747001/
Nisic stressed that the absence of permits does not mean mining waste is being handled irresponsibly.
“From my professional experience, I can assert that mining waste in Serbia is managed responsibly, as evidenced by the fact that Serbia is one of the countries with the lowest rate of incidents at mining waste disposal sites in Europe and beyond,” she said.
“Before the country adopted a regulation requiring permits, there was no practice or legal obligation to obtain a permit for managing mining waste,” Nisic told BIRN. At the time, the disposal of mining waste was carried out regularly, in a fully planned manner, in accordance with legal regulations; it’s just that the formal document called a ‘permit’ did not exist.”