Green light for Samarco
THE Samarco joint venture between Vale SA and BHP Group has been given approval to resume operations at the Germano iron ore plant in Brazil, four years after a fatal dam collapse there. It is understood that 10 of the 12 members of Minas Gerais state environmental council, known as Copam, voted in favour of an operational corrective licence for the mine. Samarco has had its operations halted since the 2015 Fundão waste dam collapse that killed 19 people and resulted in flooding across more than 600km in one of the worst environmental disasters in the country’s mining history. The mining dam failure had affected the downstream Santarem dam, causing a “significant release” of mine tailings to flood the nearby...