Rio Tinto is providing the metal that will go into making all 4,700 gold, silver and bronze medals at the 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic games.

Metal for the medals will come from the company’s Bingham Canyon (Kennecott) mine in Utah, USA, and its Oyu Tolgoi mine in Mongolia, where major concerns exist over air and water pollution, deadly health impacts, water scarcity and indigenous rights.

On its website Rio Tinto claims: “We are right behind London 2012′s commitment to delivering the most sustainable Games” and that providing the medals “is a good way for us to tell our story with a global audience and share more about what we do and the sustainable way we do it.”

Yet visitors from communities directly impacted by the mines themselves travelled to London for the Rio Tinto AGM on Thursday 19 April to confront the company and present a different story. Evidence exist that, while the company reports multi-billion dollar profits for its shareholders, the legacy it is leaving for communities is causing grave dangers to public health, the environment  and human rights.

Oyu Tolgoi Mine, Mongolia

Oyu Tolgoi is a rich copper and gold deposit in the Gobi Desert in Southern Mongolia.  One of the key concerns is that the mine will use enormous quantities of water in a desert region and the company has failed to demonstrate the availability of sufficient water needed for production, infrastructure and the social needs of the project. The deposit lies in close proximity to the Gobi Small and Galbyn Gobi Strictly Protected Area zones, overlapping Important Bird Area and Critical Natural Habitats. This fragile arid ecosystem does not have enough water to carry this huge mine.

Mongolian campaigners say the company has not shared vital information with the public. Impacts assessments omit issues of toxic emissions, chemical exposure and human health. Local communities, and especially nomadic herders, are not aware of the chemical exposure and health risks that this mine will have for them and their livestock.

Trucking of minerals from mines in the region is already causing significant dust pollution, affecting human health and the environment. Opening the Oyu Tolgoi mine will worsen this.

The nomadic herders in the South Gobi region are carriers of an ancient culture known to the world as Mongolian nomadism. However, Rio Tinto and its investors are not recognising them as people indigenous to this area and carriers of a traditional culture and lifestyle that is under threat of extinction.

Bingham Canyon Mine, Utah, USA  

The Rio Tinto Bingham Canyon mine is the single largest open pit mining operation and the deepest excavation of its kind in the world.  There is no other mining operation in the world this large that is so close to a population of 1.8 million – possibly making the direct adverse impacts on public health unique.  Groups in Utah are protesting about air pollution from Rio Tinto’s Bingham Canyon operations, which contributes to hundreds of premature deaths each year in the Salt Lake City area.

In February 2011, Forbes business magazine ranked Salt Lake City as the ninth most toxic city in the United States, and the largest contributor to that ranking was the Rio Tinto open pit copper mine. The Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxics Release Inventory revealed that Rio Tinto/Kennecott Bingham Canyon copper mining and processing complex is the largest single source of the 650 toxic compounds tracked in this database.  The waste rock piles, fugitive dust and tailings emissions further increase the community’s overall exposure to toxic heavy metals, and a planned expansion will certainly increase these heavy metal releases. In fact, the coal power plants currently operated by Rio Tinto continuously emit mercury and radioactive elements like uranium and thorium into the air.  Local children’s exposure to them steadily increases year after year.  The mine is also accused of creating massive mining-related ground water contamination involving the Great Salt Lake and the ground water adjacent to it.

According to the Utah Department of Workforce Services, as of 2009, Rio Tinto emitted about 14,500 lbs of air pollutants per employee, far more than any other business.  Currently Rio Tinto provides less than one quarter of 1% of the jobs in Salt Lake and Utah Counties, but about 30% of the pollution.

Dr Brian Moench, of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, reports that the American Heart Association’s formula indicates that between 1,000 and 2,000 Utah residents die every year because of air pollution. Rio Tinto’s contribution to it means that between 100 and 200 Utah residents die every year because of air pollution created by Rio Tinto.

Dr. Moench pointed out in December 2011: “They made profits of $15 billion dollars this year. They have more than enough money to put serious pollution mitigation measures in place, and they refuse to.”

Utah Moms for Clean Air and Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment are taking the mining company to court for violations of the Federal Clean Air Act.

But these are not the only concerns about Rio Tinto.

The company’s Ranger Uranium Mine in Australia is spilling radioactive water into the surrounding area and is opposed by Aboriginal communities. Uranium from the Ranger Mine was used at the Fukushima nuclear power station in Japan.

In 2000, the Indonesian government’s National Human Rights Commission investigation into allegations of abuses at Rio Tinto’s now closed Kelian Gold Mine found gross violations.  Since the mine opened in 1992, the Commission revealed, the Indonesian military and company security had forcibly evicted traditional miners, burned down villages, and arrested and detained protestors. Kelian employees have also been named in a number of incidents of sexual harassment, rape and violence against local women between1987 and 1997, including abuse and rape committed by senior company staff against local Indigenous Dayak women.

The Kelian Mine’s cyanide heap-leaching process has left behind a toxic time bomb of contaminated tailings ponds which threaten villages in the area and have polluted the Kelian River where local people say they cannot drink or bathe in the water.

Rio Tinto is also accused of human rights abuses around the Grasberg copper and gold mine in Indonesian-occupied West Papua. Rio Tinto paid mine owner PT Freeport Indonesia to expand operations despite the opposition of local Indigenous Peoples and the long-standing conflict in the area between the Indonesian military and independence fighters.

The mine has caused “massive environmental destruction” in West Papua due to the dumping of waste, including toxic metals, into the local river system.  According to WALHI, a leading Indonesian environmental group, the mine has already disposed of one billion tonnes of tailings into the local river system, resulting in copper concentrations in local rivers that are double the Indonesian legal fresh water limit. Over the life of the project, the mine reportedly will dump up to 3.5 billion tonnes of waste .

In Bougainville, in the Pacific, the company hopes to reopen a copper mine which caused such catastrophic pollution that local people closed it down. Vicious repression of anti-mine protesters by the Government of Papua New Guinea sparked a war for independence.

The QMM Mine in Madagascar provides yet another example of Rio Tinto’s apparent disregard for the communities and environment in which it operates.  The mine reportedly contains at least 75 million tons of ilmenite deposits, which are found in mineral sands, and could be operational for up to 40 years.

Thousands of people have already been affected by the mining operation through displacement, loss of lands, disruption to fishing, flooding to agricultural areas and dust pollution over food growing and pasture areas, affecting livelihoods and food production. Those who have already been displaced have received inadequate compensation and local people have also lost free access to their forest resources  which act as a survival mechanism when crops fail.  These are some of the poorest people on the island, being subsistence farmers dependent on the land, and earning less than a dollar a day. The influx of workers from elsewhere has increased demand for food and housing, driving prices up beyond what local residents can afford.

The company is accused of violation of Indigenous treaty rights at the Eagle Mine site in Michigan, USA. Persistent local citizen opposition against Rio Tinto’s Eagle Mine includes concerns that waste water-injection into aquifers will impact local water quality, potential for irreversible acid mine drainage, ecosystem degradation and the technical likelihood of mine collapse.

Also in the USA, the company is under attack for continuing water pollution at its now closed Flambeau mine in Wisconsin, and of planning the Pebble copper-gold project with Anglo American plc, which would threaten the pristine waters of Bristol Bay, Alaska, and is opposed by Indigenous Peoples and salmon fishermen.

The company has a poor record on labour rights around the world. In addition to a history of disputes in Australia, the company locked out workers at its Borax plant in Boron, California, in early 2010, has been in dispute with workers at the Grasberg Mine in West Papua in recent months, and in late December 2011 illegally locked out 780 workers (24 hours before it had the legal right to do so) at the Rio Tinto Alcan plant at Alma, Quebec, Canada. The Alma workers, represented by USW (the United Steel Workers union)remain locked out in late April 2012. They are not demanding higher wages or greater benefits, but trying to ensure secure jobs for the future. Rio Tinto wants to use more subcontractors to replace the jobs of unionised workers as they retire. Subcontracted workers are paid significantly less than unionsed workers, and the union believes in equal pay for equal work. For the history of the dispute, see http://www.justiceforriotintoworkers.ca/the-lockout/. For further information, see http://www.justiceforriotintoworkers.ca/.

Rio Tinto is bad news for many communities around the world. It is a scandal that it should be providing the metal for the London Olympic medals!

You can read much more at http://londonminingnetwork.org/docs/Rio-Tinto-background-information-2011.doc.

For an account of the complaints made against the company at its 2011 AGM in London, see http://londonminingnetwork.org/2011/04/london-events-around-the-rio-tinto-agm/ and watch the interviews with activists from Utah and elsewhere at http://londonminingnetwork.org/2011/04/rio-tinto-the-movie/.

For a complete list of LMN’s archive on Rio Tinto, see http://londonminingnetwork.org/tag/rio-tinto/.

For further background on the company, you can also buy a copy of Plunder!, a history of Rio Tinto up t0 1991, by sending a cheque for £10 made out to Partizans to: Partizans, 41a Thornhill Square, London N1 1BE, England.

 You can vote for Rio Tinto as worst 2012 Olympic corporate sponsor at http://www.greenwashgold.org/.

Bumi plc's Kaltim Prima Coal mine in Indonesia. Photo: JATAM

London Mining Network has today published a report calling on the government to include a review of regulatory regimes as part of the current discussion on the Financial Services Bill. The Bill is replacing the existing FSA with a new body, the Financial Conduct Authority, which will inherit the FSA’s role as UK Listing Authority.

Looking at eight case studies, the report, UK-Listed Mining Companies & the Case for Stricter Oversight, argues that:

• Many mining companies listed in London have very poor records of complicity in human rights abuse, environmental pollution or destruction of people’s cultures and livelihoods around the world.
• Once listed in London, some mining companies have continued to flout the law in the countries where they operate, or engage in damaging tax avoidance, or break accepted international mining industry standards, with no move by the UK Listing Authority to discipline them.

John McDonnell MP, who will be chairing the Parliamentary launch of the report today, said:

“We cannot stand by and witness these global mining companies brutally impoverishing and destroying the lives and environments of whole communities. We need not only to expose this exploitation but also to demand that a firm system of international regulation, control and accountability is put in place that halts the destructive activities of these corporate pirates.”

Peter Frankental, the Economic Relations Programme Director of Amnesty International UK, said:

“This report by London Mining Network presents a challenge to the Government to ensure that the proposed regulatory body has the powers to require mining companies to meet acceptable human rights and environmental standards as a condition for listing on the London Stock Exchange”.

Richard Solly, Co-ordinator of London Mining Network, said:

“This report provides a reminder to the Government of the need for measures to ensure that the London Stock Exchange does not continue to act as a repository for dodgy companies that harm the environment and abuse human rights. The ease with which such companies can list in the UK is an indictment of the existing regulatory framework”.

The report can be downloaded from http://londonminingnetwork.org/docs/lmn-the-case-for-stricter-oversight.pdf.

The eight London-listed mining companies looked at tin the report are African Barrick, Brinkley Mining, African Minerals, London Mining, Vedanta Resources, Glencore, GCM Resources and Bumi.

The Government has introduced its Financial Services Bill, which is being considered in Committee between 21 February and 20 March.

Wednesday 29th February marked the launch of Gaia Foundation’s new report, Opening Pandora’s Box – A New Wave of Land Grabbing for the Extractive Industries and The Devastating Impact on Earth. The report was produced with the support of London Mining Network.

This much anticipated report alerts global citizens to the dynamics in the extractive industries as a whole, and shows the alarming scale of this overall trend. Just as in the Greek myth, when Pandora opened the box and let out all the troubles known to mortals, so too this new wave of land grabbing for mining is leading to unimaginable destruction. If hope does remain, we must wake-up and act now.

See http://www.gaiafoundation.org/news/launch-of-the-pandoras-box-report.

To read the report’s executive summary, see http://www.gaiafoundation.org/sites/default/files/executivesummary.pdf.

To read the full report, see http://www.gaiafoundation.org/sites/default/files/Pandorasboxlowres.pdf.

Global mining boom is leading to landgrab, says report

Huge increase in large-scale mining is being fuelled by the rising price of metals and oil, as search for minerals centres on Africa.

See http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/mar/01/global-mining-boom-landgrab-africa.

Other media coverage of the report is at:

See http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5ggU5a5myh4ewO_qJ9P-8EasAa_YQ?docId=CNG.b16557cdf41a87e85d20681fb83362ab.31.

Read the Bankwatch report at http://bankwatch.org/sites/default/files/spirited-away-mongolia-mining.pdf.

See the video at http://bankwatch.org/news-media/blog/video-spirited-away-mongolias-mining-boom-and-people-development-left-behind.

Among London-listed mining companies active in Colombia are Anglo American, AngloGold Ashanti, BHP Billiton, Glencore, Rio Tinto and Xstrata.

See http://www.minesandcommunities.org/article.php?a=11381&l=1.

Given the entrenchment of opposition to mine, including by thousands of subsistence farmers who have said they are ready to die to prevent this mine, there appears to be a real risk of large scale violence.

LMN member group LAMMP co-ordinated the preparation of an open letter of protest to the President of Peru, and produced a video. The letter was co-signed by LMN, a number of its member groups, and many others. See http://lammp.org/2011/12/10/1750/.

Among investors in Newmont are UK-based Blackrock World Mining Trust and AXA Investment Managers UK. See http://moneytometal.org/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&button=&search=newmont.

So says Greenpeace in a new report, released just prior to the climate change conference being held in Durban this week.

See http://www.minesandcommunities.org/article.php?a=11329&l=1

See http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/nov/30/coal-banks.

Report available at http://www.banktrack.org/download/bankrolling_climate_change/climatekillerbanks_final_0.pdf.

See
http://www.minesandcommunities.org/article.php?a=11332&l=1

See http://maplecroft.com/about/news/womens_girls_right_index.html.

To read the alternative report, see http://bhpbillitonwatch.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/bhpb_report_sml.pdf.

See http://www.accountabilityproject.org/article.php?id=668.

Nearest tube: Knightsbridge.

Organised by:

Colombia Solidarity Campaign

Movimiento 22

COLOMBIA, the second most BIODIVERSE country in the world, home to 105 INDIGENOUS CULTURES, is under theat by MINING MULTINATIONALS.  Mining titles now cover 8% of national territory.  London-listed ANGLOGOLD ASHANTI holds the majority of them, many in Indigenous or Afro-Colombian lands, or areas with UNIQUE or IRREPLACEABLE ECOSYSTEMS.  Land is being handed over to mining companies with the blessing of the Colombian state.

On 3 June this year, 13,000 people marched in the streets of Tolima to say YES TO LIFE, and NO TO LA COLOSA MINE.  Unless stopped, La Colosa will become the largest open cast gold mine in South America.  Nestled in the Colombian Andes in an area of strategic importance as a ‘water factory’, the CYANIDE used to process the ore will contaminate water for drinking and irrigation for the wider region.  Colombians are demanding the right to continue living in a clean and safe environment.

The people of Tolima will march again on 14 OCTOBER. They would like Colombians and Friends of Colombia throughout the world to show their Solidarity, by convening at their closest Colombian Embassy on the day to say YES TO LIFE, and NO TO THE MINE.  Our solidarity is of utmost importance as recently, threats have been received by opponents of the mine in Anaime, near Cajamarca, Tolima.

Bring Placards, Banners and let’s make a noise!!

More info:

Report: LA COLOSA: The Quest for El Dorado in Cajamarca, Colombia
http://www.colombiasolidarity.org.uk/mining/548-la-colosa-the-quest-for-el-dorado-in-cajamarca-colombia

Documentary: Gold Fever in Cajamarca http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHxcZZ50opU

Documentary: AngloGold Ashanti in Ghana http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7Mz4hsCEpk

Threats to opponents of the mine: http://www.elnuevodia.com.co/nuevodia/tolima/regional/112789-campesinos-de-anaime-amenazados-por-coincidencias

Ill-equipped to compete and survive in the emerging clean energy economy it must rely on political clout, misleading public relations campaigns, and the externalization of devastating human health, social, and environmental costs.

In community after community around the world this has stirred a toxic brew of deadly pollution, lost livelihoods, intimidation, and corruption.

This publication gives voice to the brave activists from around the world whose daily struggle bears witness to this ongoing tragedy as they counter the ravenous nature of this dirty, dangerous, and outdated industry. Rather than be bowed by the industry’s onslaught, these activists are leading communities across the world to band together and fight back. Their valiant struggle comes at a time when clean energy is being rapidly deployed without sacrificing communities or ecosystems. An inconvenient truth the coal industry is fighting to suppress as it attempts to claw its way into the 21st century.

From the aquamarine waters off Cirebon Indonesia, to the historic Appalachian mountains of the United States, to the lush biodiversity of the Konkan coast of India communities around the world are issuing a clarion call to end the coal industry’s wanton destruction and seize the momentous opportunity clean energy presents. These are their stories.

See http://www.sierraclub.org/coal/narratives/downloads/MoveBeyondCoalNow.pdf.

See also London Mining Network’s draft declaration on coal mining at http://londonminingnetwork.org/2011/07/draft-declaration-on-coal-mining/ and let us know if you agree with it.

The UK will be reviewed on the 23rd and 24th of August and the concluding observations should be posted at the close of the session on the 2nd of September.

Amnesty International’s submission is at http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cerd/docs/ngos/AI_UK_CERD79.pdf.

Submission by PIPLinks, Down to Earth, University of Middlesex and London Mining Network is at http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cerd/docs/ngos/UKERIP_UK_CERD79.doc.