Air Date: Week of September 5, 2025

Nickel mining is an environmentally destructive process that can create conditions in which Chromium-6 is formed. (Photo: The Gecko Project)

Nickel is a key mineral for the clean energy transition but can come at a cost to local communities because of how polluting nickel mining operations can be. In Indonesia leaked company documents reveal that Harita Nickel, one of the world’s largest nickel mining companies, knowingly polluted fresh water sources. Alon Aviram, a reporter with the nonprofit journalism newsroom called The Gecko Project, joins Host Paloma Beltran to discuss their investigation.

Transcript

DOERING: It’s Living on Earth, I’m Jenni Doering.

BELTRAN: And I’m Paloma Beltran.

The silvery-white metal nickel is an important component of wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicle batteries. So, it’s a key ingredient in the clean energy transition, but it comes at a cost to local communities because of how polluting nickel mining operations can be. Leaked company documents reveal that Harita Nickel, one of the world’s largest nickel mining companies, knowingly polluted fresh water sources for the town of Kawasi on the Indonesian island of Obi. Alon Aviram is a reporter with the nonprofit journalism newsroom called The Gecko Project, which investigated the pollution from Harita Nickel. Alon, welcome to Living on Earth!

AVIRAM: Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

BELTRAN: So you were part of this reporting team that traveled to the Obi village after leaked documents exposed water pollution linked to the nearby mining company Harita Nickel. How were local communities affected by this contamination?

AVIRAM: Behind Kawasi Village, which is a small village on the western shores of the island, is a large company, one of the most powerful mining companies of Indonesia, Harita Nickel. And we ended up working discreetly with an Indonesian reporter who went to Obi and interviewed people on the ground and collected information as part of the reporting team. The general picture is that the people that they interviewed who, you know, welcomed them into their homes and took them around the village. They described a situation where illnesses are endemic. Many people have skin irritation, you know, their repeated respiratory issues. One woman who was interviewed, a mother called Nurhayati, a local resident who we quote in our piece. You know, she talks about having this chronic cough, and some people have taken in Kawasi are purchasing kind of filtered water instead of using the drinking spring. But one person who we spoke to, a local fisherman, he said that he simply couldn't afford to be buying his own water. So, there's also like a division there within the community where, you know, people who can afford to buy drinking water are definitely doing that, and others aren't, and then many are still using it for cooking and washing and so on and so forth. But yeah, certainly the people that our reporter spoke with described a situation which didn't sound like a just transition.

BELTRAN: So chromium six plays a key role in this story. It's a byproduct of mining, and a lot of people may recognize the name because of the Erin Brockovich movie or the Erin Brockovich case. What are some of the dangers associated with this chemical, and how is it impacting water supplies across Obi village?

AVIRAM: So yeah, hexavalent chromium. I'll call it chromium six, because it's just a bit of less of a mouthful. It's a carcinogen. It's a toxin which can have like severe health effects if inhaled or consumed at high levels, and chromium is a naturally occurring metal in the ground there and in a lot of like nickel mining areas. And when it's in the ground, it's in a nontoxic form, predominantly, the chromium oxidizes and can then mobilize or turn into chromium six, which is the toxic form of chromium. So you have this situation where the mining can then trigger this occurrence of chromium turning into chromium six, and in an area of like high rainfall, which Obi is, it's in the tropics, what you find is that water kind of comes spilling down the hillsides, down ravines, across the lands which is being mined, and across the areas which are storing waste. And then this can carry the chromium six into surrounding waterways and into the ground and environment. And this is what was being identified by Harita in internal emails and documents. And this was like happening again and again, from 2012 onwards in the files that we saw.

BELTRAN: And according to your investigation, what evidence is there that Harita Nickel, the mining company, was responsible for the contamination?

AVIRAM: It's hard to establish conclusively whether health symptoms that are like widely reported by local people is directly caused by a single pollutant like chromium six, but we spoke with a range of experts, toxicologists, epidemiologists, and a range of other qualified experts who reviewed the data that came from Harita, you know, this was company data from Harita itself. They looked at the figures that they had recorded from spring water monitoring samples, and they said that while you couldn't say categorically that people would experience, you know, various illnesses and adverse health effects from drinking this water that it certainly increased the risk of them experiencing various health conditions. So the bottom line is, we don't know without more data on like, how the people of Kawasi have been impacted by this, but they have certainly been put at greater risk by these elevated levels.

BELTRAN: How did Harita, this mining company, how did they react once they knew that high levels of chromium were present in the water supply?

AVIRAM: So Harita when it realized that there were high levels of chromium six coming out of wastewater. It started to introduce like various measures to try and mitigate that, to try and reduce the levels. It had leachate ponds, sediment ponds. It used chemical fixes to try and reduce the levels and even wetlands to try and neutralize the pollutant as well. But it had limited success, and there were repeated spikes in chromium six that it was detecting through its own tests. It had its own technicians out in the field taking samples and then testing those in its own laboratories, and then it was feeding this information kind of up the chain to senior environmental managers within the company, and highlighting that these were levels that were above the legal limit, and on repeated occasions, they attributed this contamination to its own operations.

BELTRAN: And how did local communities from Kawasi react? To what extent were they aware that their water was being contaminated?

AVIRAM: It's one of those things where people can they can tell you what the water tastes like, what it smells like if it's changed color. And people would say that, you know, in interviews that we carried out, people talk to us about their kind of suspicions that something was up that, you know, people talked about the water having changed in taste and smell and color, since, you know, when they were kids, when they would just drink straight from the local river and so on and so forth. But they weren't sure if there had actually been, you know, pollution, or they couldn't categorically prove it with, like, hard data. And I should clarify that the repeated high levels of chromium six in drinking water was throughout 2022 so from February ‘22 to February ‘23 and what preceded that is about a decade's worth of repeatedly high levels of water contamination in wastewater, in river water. The likely cause was that the aquifer itself had been contaminated, but they hadn't told people at the time, we've got a chromium six problem in your drinking spring. We're trying to establish what the problem is, and we'll keep you updated. And here's some bottled water instead.

BELTRAN: You know, Alon, nickel is meant to be one of the transition metals to move away from gasoline-powered vehicles and expand electric vehicles, and a lot of battery producers have pledged to source materials responsibly. What do you make of these stories where mining companies are polluting neighboring communities?

AVIRAM: I think we have a situation where there's definitely a need to decarbonize, and people are on the streets of London, Washington, Paris, everywhere around the world are flocking to buy EV cars. And on the face of it, it seems like a good thing, we're stepping towards the green transition, but there are complicated layers to this, and the underbelly of this transition is one that deserves more scrutiny, because fueling this transition are often environmental violations and issues that are exported abroad to places like Indonesia and other countries where critical minerals transition minerals are being mined and processed, and you don't see that when you're driving your EV, your Tesla, your Mercedes Benz, your BMW, but I think there's a duty on car companies, on various actors within the supply chain, to ensure that the companies that are doing the mining, doing the refining in places like Indonesia and places like Obi Island are carrying out their activities, their their business operations, in a way which benefits local people and doesn't harm the environment. And it's this sort of dichotomy of jeopardizing a local ecosystem for the benefit of global carbon emissions is one that needs to be contended with more seriously. There are real disparities in terms of, you know, who's accumulating wealth and what does life look like for the residents who are surrounded by these metals which are fueling the EV boom.

BELTRAN: Alon Aviram is a reporter with the nonprofit investigative journalism newsroom called The Gecko Project. Thanks so much for speaking with us today.

AVIRAM: It was a real pleasure. Thank you so much.

BELTRAN: The Gecko Project and its partners in the investigation reached out to the Indonesian government prior to the release of the report but did not receive a response. During the summer months Indonesia experienced heavy rains, flooding several villages where Harita nickel operated. Making matters worse, a sediment pond built by the company to contain runoff was breached. Mudslides and flooding are common across Indonesia but according to Earthworks, “Residents say mining activities and the clearing of forests by Harita Group and its subsidiaries” contributed to the floods.

 

Links

Read about The Gecko Project’s nickel mining story

In response to allegations, Harita Nickel shared this article in lieu of a statement