Karabashmed

The Karabash smelter was founded in 1910 ^{[1] by an} English joint-stock company headed by concessionaire Leslie Urquhart ^[2] .

In the years of the first five - year plan, the plant was integrated into the system of the copper mining industry of the Ural region ^[3] .

Due to the fact that the equipment of the enterprise was not practically modernized during the years of Soviet power, by the end of the 20th century the ecological situation in Karabash was extremely aggravated. In the 1970-80s, several times unsuccessfully tried to close or reprofile ^[4] . By order of the Ministry of Natural Resources dated June 25, 1996 No. 299, the city of Karabash and the adjacent territories were described as an environmental disaster zone ^[5] . It was noted that the annual volume of emissions of poisonous sulphurous anhydride into the atmosphere by the plant was more than 118 thousand tons (about 7 tons per city resident) ^[6] . The plant's surroundings have practically lost vegetation.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the plant has been gradually modernizing production and switching to more environmentally friendly technologies ^[7] . In 2009, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Ecology of the Russian Federation excluded Karabash from the list of cities with the highest level of atmospheric pollution ^[8] . As of 2014, the situation in the city and its environs is more reminiscent of an environmental disaster ^[9] .

In 2014, with the help of the regional budget money, a special landfill for waste disposal was built here, which is also planned to be used for the needs of neighboring Zlatoust, Miass and Chebarkul. A small city (11 with a small thousand inhabitants) can become a giant landfill for the disposal of waste of a significant part (452 ​​thousand people) of the Chelyabinsk region ^{[10] [11]} .

In 2019, a waste sorting plant was opened in Karabash ^[12] .

In May 2019, the former presenter of the telecast “ Oryol and Reshka ” Yevsey Kovalev visited Karabash and shared his impressions of the environmental situation in the city ^[13] .

According to environmental control data, over a year the pipes of the plant in Karabash release more than 180 tons of gases into the atmosphere, which then fall into the city in the form of acid rain and white flakes ^[14] .

In order to improve the quality of drinking water, within the framework of the federal project “Preservation of Unique Water Objects”, the Ministry of Ecology of the Chelyabinsk Region implements a set of environmental measures, the key of which are the construction of a diversion channel of the Sak-Elga River and a hydro-botanical site ^[15] .

On October 1, 2015, a depressurization of the melting furnace exhaust gas cooling system occurred in the metallurgical workshop of the plant. As a result, 10 employees of the enterprise received burns of varying severity, of which two later died ^{[16] [17]} .

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  Karabash Copper Plant in 1925

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  The modern look of the enterprise

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  Mountain in Karabash, deprived of vegetation from the effects of emissions of "Karabashmed"

• Company official website
• Company page on the website of Russian Copper Company CJSC
• "The copper path of RMK." Part 2 - video report "RMK" about the plant.