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Charity Ruzvidzo Business Reporter
BELMONT Leather, which was recently ordered to shut down by the Environmental Management Agency, is seeking a reprieve after it embarked on corrective waste disposal measures.
The company’s judicial manager Tawanda Mudarikwa told Business Chronicle last week that it wants the order reviewed. “We were shut down on the basis that we were polluting water by disposing suspended solid and chromium content within the discharged water,” said Mudarikwa.
“We were in the wrong. For us the case was discharging suspended solid and chromium content within the water, thus we have begun to engage the corrective measures to get back on our feet.”
Mudarikwa said on receiving the order they ceased all operations and embarked on a clean up exercise to allow room for treatment and testing of the effluent.
“We moved all the sludge to disused production processing tanks, sedimentation and subsequent dehydrating and drying. The thick sludge was dried up packed and dumped at the municipal dumpsite as usual,” he said.
He said the company has since invited EMA after carrying out the correctional measures for a trial run.
Mudarikwa however said EMA was taking long to respond.
“We are in a nation that is facing economic hardships, high unemployment. With such situations we wish EMA could respond quickly,” he said.
Mudarikwa said they were indeed in the wrong with EMA but they were good under the Bulawayo City Council standards.
“BCC saw our standards as good but EMA thought otherwise as they use a European standard bench mark for assessing standards thus they gave us orders to shut down,” he said.
Belmont Leather is one of the two tanneries that were shut down in Bulawayo recently for polluting the environment. It specialises in processing raw hides.
A recent report produced by a cabinet taskforce on pollution chaired by Local Government, Public Works and National Housing Minister Dr Ignatius Chombo indicated that a disaster was looming along Umguza River and its tributaries because of unprocessed waste disposal.
Some of the companies fingered in the report are Delta Beverages, Schweppes, Ingwebu Breweries, Colcom, CSC, Treger, Kango and United Refineries.
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