Ukraine’s largest independent media company has published an analytical material on amber mining and land reclamation in Rivne region.
The basis of the material was information about the work of AmberTrade (“Sonyachne Remeslo Center ” LLC), which was provided by our operations director Andrii Pietukhov.
Suspilne TV channel also showed how the AmberTrade team, together with the governor of Rivne Oblast Vitaliy Koval and representatives of local administrations, recently reforested a 17-hectare area where amber was previously mined.
In addition, the head of the Department of Agrochemistry, Soil Science and Agriculture of the National University of Water Management and Nature Management, Tetyana Kolesnyk, told in the marathon of the Suspilne TV channel how to do reclamation correctly and what is the deadline for soil restoration on damaged areas.
Enterprise and reclamation
In the use of the enterprise “Sonyachne Remeslo Center” LLC is a plot of 84 hectares. It received a license for the legal extraction of “solar stones” by the quarry method. According to the governor of Rivne Oblast Vitaliy Koval, in 2022 the enterprise extracted almost 9 tons of amber – this is the largest indicator of legal extraction among the regions of Ukraine.
The company received a special permit for amber mining in 2009. We are talking about an area of 84 hectares, and amber reserves will be enough to continue mining until the end of 2025:
“The company has been carrying out industrial mining since 2014 and is still working today. Land restoration is not only a business obligation from the point of view of legislation but also a matter of our social responsibility to the community and ourselves. According to our project, we are planting pine and birch. Ten thousand pine and birch seedlings per one hectare of worked territory.”
Before receiving a plot of land, each company must develop a land acquisition project, including reclamation of the plot:
“We have to recultivate all used areas. At the first stage of reclamation, the area is leveled with the help of an excavator and a bulldozer, then this area is plowed by tractor equipment. The last stage — we signed a contract with the Rafalivka Forestry State Enterprise and they directly planted pine and birch on our plot. We are reclaiming the site as the field is developed. In 2021, we rehabilitated an area of 18 hectares, where 180,000 seedlings were planted. Now we can see that about 98% of the seedlings have taken root in our territory. What exactly to plant was developed for us in the project by the Rivne Institute of Land Management.”
Results of reclamation
“In a broad sense, reclamation is the restoration of land productivity. We can reclaim land in the same direction in which it was used. An example is forestry or agriculture. Reclamation is completed when the land has regained the productivity it had before the disturbance. If it is forestry land, the stage of reclamation ends when there are green areas,” the head of the Department of Agrochemistry, Soil Science and Agriculture of the National University of Water Management and Nature Management, Tetyana Kolesnyk explains.
