Environment raises the bar on aggregates extraction

Santo Domingo.- The Environment Ministry on Wednesday issued new restrictions to extract aggregates, according to Resolution No. 0001/2017, signed by minister Francisco Dominguez.

The resolution’s mechanisms seek greater controls and supervision on their environmental impact and assure remediation of the usual damages caused be extractions.

Among other conditions, Environment specifies the standard lists of basic documents that will allow to regularize hundreds of companies that have operated for years without effective supervision, resulting from red tape and other reasons.

“What we are looking for with this measure is to simplify the procedures, to make them more agile and transparent, so that anyone who complies with the legal requirements can exercise their commercial activity, but at the same time ensure that they will be surmounted once and for all, the weaknesses and inconsistencies found in the concessions to extract aggregates,” the official said.

Dominguez said the measure is also expected to ease the pressure which the extraction of aggregates bear on vulnerable areas or riverbeds, “places where the law forbids it, but also that the so-called ‘dry quarries’ can benefit from plans of Environmental compliance.”

Environment’s regulations call for the automatic rejection of requests for projects within protected areas, rivers and streams and wetlands, ss well as those located within 150 meters of coastal areas; areas of high risk for populations or infrastructure of public services, among other exclusions.