The governor of the Valparaíso region, Rodrigo Mundaca, addressed the decarbonization process that the Government seeks to promote and the decision of the National Copper Corporation (Codelco), whose board approved moving towards the closure of the Ventana smelter, located in Quintero, in the face of pollution episodes. In this regard, he said that “we must reformulate the graduality.”
“The government program proposed ending the sacrifice zones and starting a process of decarbonization of the energy matrix (…) today, thinking about graduality when we have situations of this nature, of such a high impact on people’s lives, I think we must definitely reformulate the issue of graduality,” Mundaca said in conversation with CNN Chile.
On the Ventanas smelter, he said that “it is the one that contributes 62% of the sulfur dioxide to the environment, 50% of the sulfur dioxide at the regional level, but it must also be said that today Chile does not have an environmental standard similar to the one supported or proposed by the World Health Organization.”
“Today, it is undoubtedly essential to improve our environmental standards according to what the WHO proposes. For example, today we have no arsenic standard in Chile; the sulphur dioxide standard is completely lax,” the regional authority added.
In that line, he said that “today, when I talk about a structural problem, I mean this problem. A problem that is related to the fact that today the environmental standard allows situations of this nature to be repeated also in Tocopilla, Mejillones, Huasco, Coronel and, particularly on this occasion, in what is happening in our region, in our territory”.
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