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“Unsightly” mess left behind by a century of mining.
Retired foreman Wayne Tonelli worked in Sudbury’s nickel mines since he was a teenager, but his new gig is pretty sweet.
That’s because his old boss Vale (formerly Inco) is mining for more than metals these days. The company is in the ‘liquid gold’ business, enlisting thousands of honey bees to help restore a Sudbury landscape blighted by more than a century of nickel and copper mining and smelting.
“I like being outside after 40 years underground,” says Tonelli, now a bee-keeper for the international resources giant as part of a company program to re-green the area that decades back looked like a moonscape.
He carefully tends to seven hives containing 350,000 bees that are used to pollinate the blooming wildflowers the company has planted across 120 acres of unsightly black slag piles formed by waste from the Copper Cliff smelter complex, upon which the massive Superstack chimney sits.
“Bio-diversity is the buzz word in the resource industry these days,” explains Glen Watson, superintendent, reclamation and decommissioning for Vale’s Ontario operations.
Vale also has an underground tree greenhouse, where the company got the seedlings to plant more than 10 million evergreens in the Sudbury area. The year-round underground temperature of 23C is perfect environment for the tree nursery, says Watson, a biologist by trade.
The mining firm also farms fish and to date has released 5,000 rainbow trout and 1,000 walleye into local rivers.
“It’s made a huge difference,” says Watson, who was born in Sudbury and has spent 19 years with the company.
The bee-keeping business is the latest initiative by Vale, which has spent $10 million since 2006 on its ongoing drive to restore the environment to its natural state — something local communities and governments around the world used to demand but have now come to expect from mining companies.
Watson notes Vale is not the first mining company to enlist bees in their reclamation efforts (Goldcorp has been doing something similar at an old mine tailings property in Timmins). However, he thinks his company has a much bigger colony than most that have tried to start their own.
“The change has been remarkable. Pine trees and a variety of other vegetation now grow in formerly bleak hills,” says Republic of Mining blogger Stan Sudol, who grew up nearby in the 1970s.
“When NASA astronauts visited Sudbury in 1971 to study the geology (of) meteor impact zones, the southern media widely reported that they came due to the region’s resemblance to the moon. Unfortunately, that story still occasionally haunts the community,” notes Sudol.
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