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09 December 2009

Today, residents of Zamdela, Sasolburg and the Vaal Triangle, staged a Die-In at Sasol’s main gate in Sasolburg to bring the world’s attention to the impact Sasol’s dirty industry has on climate change. Below is the memorandum delivered to Sasol Management, the South African Minister of Water and Environmental Affairs and President Zuma.

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Memorandum from the residents of Sasolburg, Zamdela and the Vaal Triangle

Supported by Climate Justice Now! South Africa

Date: Wednesday, 9th of December 2009

Venue: Sasol Main Gate, Sasolburg

Submitted to: Sasol Management, Sasolburg; The Minister of Water and Environmental Affair and The South African Presidency

We the people of Sasolburg and Zamdela in the Free State and the Vaal Triangle in general are saying ‘enough is enough’ the time has arrived that Sasol be held accountable for polluting our local environment and contributing to global climate change.

Today Climate Justice Now! South Africa stands in support of us the people of Sasolburg, Zamdela and the Vaal Triangle. We the people at the gates of Sasol want to highlight to South Africans and the world that Sasol is a dying archaic industry. It is a fossil dinosaur, whose activities result in climate change and the destruction of our planet.

Zamdela and Sasolburg was developed to supply cheap labour to the apartheid created coal to liquid plant that was built on the coal beds in the Vaal as the strategic fuel company for the apartheid government, who could not freely access crude oil on the market because of it’s racist archaic policies.

We call on the Sasol shareholders and the management of the company to acknowledge that they have caused mach harm to the people of Zamdela and surrounding area.

We the residents of Zamdela, Sasolburg and the Vaal Triangle together with the participants of Climate Justice Now! South Africa recognise that Sasol’s dirty industry:

pollutes the neighbourhood of Zamdela, which has been confirmed by independent community based air pollution monitoring and government;
results, through their pollution, in the ill-health of the residents of the area, resulting in the impacts upon our economy by resulting in loss of workdays due to illness in the Vaal Triangle;
makes it’s Secunda plant the single biggest source of climate change pollution globally;
makes it one of the top three polluters in the Vaal Triangle including being the source of volatile organic compounds which are cancerous;
has its origins in Nazi Germany and was given huge state subsidies by the apartheid state for its development. It still receives perverse state subsidies by not being allowed to reduce it’s pollution urgently and externalise this cost onto community health and well-being;
is being expanded to Indonesia, the United States, China and India with our present democratic government’s consent while knowing the dangers of this technology;
is proposed to be expanded in the Limpopo Province in South Africa, where they are planning a third coal to liquid plant for the country.

Furthermore, Sasol:

is using the climate change debate to increase its obscene profits via cleaner development mechanism initiatives where it will receive money for ‘claiming’ that they have reduced pollution;
knows that climate change could threaten its future and concedes in official documents that international efforts to counter climate change could have a “material adverse effect” on its business and “financial condition”;
has pushed the yet unproven carbon capture and storage as an acceptable technology fix within the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change;
has paid more than 2.5 million rand to the Livingston Group to lobby the United States Congress to support coal to liquid in the US; and
Sasol has been nominated for the Angry Mermaid Award in Copenhagen at the Climate Change Negotiations for its national and international lobbying campaign to promote carbon capture and storage as a clean solution to the dirty business of producing liquid fuels from coal and gas.

Recognising the above and the present danger of climate change not only globally but also through pollution at the fence-line where we live with Sasol in our neighbourhoods, we demand the following:

1. A total reduction of all their toxic emissions including the climate change pollution such as sulphur dioxide, carbon dioxide, methane and methane associated volatile organic compounds.

2. That the government develop an independent intensive health study process in Zamdela investigating the pollution from Sasol and the health of the people in order to better understand the impact of the pollution on the present and past health of the people.

3. At this time of climate change negotiations that Sasol releases all information relating to their cleaner development mechanism projects in South Africa.

4. That all monitoring stations and the information is publicly available through the process of transparent access to all Sasol’s Air Quality Monitoring Stations.

We also stand in solidarity with other communities facing the onslaught of Sasol. Specifically we call on Sasol and the South African government to:

1. Abandon its dirty coal to liquid plant plans in the Waterberg area

2. To respect local communities globally and to stop lobbying for the development of coal to liquid plants that are sever climate change gas emitters in countries such as India, Indonesia, China and the United States.