Three communities in Papua New Guinea are waiting for the country’s Supreme Court to decide whether their concerns about the dumping of mine waste in the sea near their homes merit cancellation of an environmental permit for mining that the government issued in 2020. U.S.-based Newmont Corporation and South Africa’s Harmony Gold Ltd., the partners in the development of the Wafi-Golpu copper and gold mine in Morobe province, want to pipe a slurry of leftover sediment, known as tailings, through a 103-kilometer (64-mile) pipeline. According to the companies’ plans, the tailings will travel from the mine through the pipeline until being discharged 200 meters (about 660 feet) under the sea at a point less than 1 km (0.6 mi) offshore in the Huon Gulf along PNG’s northern coastline. The method is known as deep-sea tailings placement (DSTP), and in December 2020, PNG’s Conservation and Environmental Protection Authority (CEPA) approved the plan laid out in the companies’ environmental impact statement (EIS). That approval triggered a series of legal battles beginning in 2021 that questioned whether Huon Gulf communities had been adequately informed of the risks of DSTP. Most recently, three leaders representing the villages of Labu Butu, Wagang and Yanga, located near the pipeline, sued CEPA’s leader and the government. Initially, the lawsuits aimed to stop the government from issuing a permit for large-scale mines called a “special mining lease” that would allow the project to move forward, citing the possibility of “catastrophic and irreplaceable damage to the marine environment and…This article was originally published on Mongabay