Toxic Smelter Smog Killing The Leaves On The Trees On The Kola Peninsula

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“Back to the 90s, when businesses shit on the laws,” is just one of many comments after people started to post photos of dying trees on Region51’s Vkontakte page in Murmansk this weekend.

The photos, which The Barents Observer received permission to republish, clearly show something is terrible wrong. This is not an early autumn coming west and southwest of Nornickel’s huge smelters. Last weekend, kilometers and kilometers of the fragile taiga nature in the same direction from Monchegorsk were covered by smog containing sulfur dioxide and heavy metals.

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After the old nickel plant in Norilsk on the Taimyr Peninsula, infamous for its bad ecological standards, was shut down a few years ago, the refining nickel production was moved to Monchegorsk which now is the world’s largest nickel refinery. Technology, though, is mostly from Soviet times.

“There is a lunar landscape around Monchegorsk, inherited from the Soviet Union,” says Andrey Zolotkov with the environmental group ANO Bellona (Murmansk). “Decades has passed, but little has changed,” he explains. “The Kola Mining and Metallurgical combine is trying to keep silent about this, something that once again shows the insufficient public openness of the Nornickel company.”

EDIT

https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/ecology/2020/08/tree-leaves-dying-days-after-massive-air-pollution-cloud