Companies in Focus: Rio Tinto - London Mining Network

Rio Tinto is a British-Australian multinational metals and mining corporation with joint headquarters in London, UK, and Melbourne, Australia, being also listed in both these countries. It is the third largest mining company in the world after Glencore and BHP, with revenue of $53.98 billion in 2025. Operating across 34 different countries around the world as shown in the map below, its commodities include aluminium, iron ore, copper, and lithium. While the company has claimed to produce materials essential to human progress, its operations include a multitude of human rights violations and various forms of environmental degradation detrimental to human wellbeing.

Source: Rio Tinto

Rio Tinto’s long history of harming people and the environment has resulted in much criticism and opposition from communities directly affected by its operations. Below is a brief summary of the main struggles that LMN is involved with. For a more extensive list of controversies, conflicts and issues surrounding Rio Tinto’s operations as well as its dark past, we invite you to look at our alternative timeline of the company’s history. Additionally, our 2020 report ‘Cut and Run’ gives an in-depth account of Rio Tinto’s legacy issues in Bougainville and West Papua, where the company has refused to take responsibility for the destructive impacts and persisting dangers caused by the Panguna and Grasberg mines respectively. In September 2020 the Human Rights Law Centre filed a complaint with the OECD on behalf of 156 indigenous residents of Bougainville regarding the pollution caused by Rio Tinto’s former mine there.

Planned destruction of sacred and public land in Arizona

Rio Tinto is the majority owner (55%, with BHP owning 45%) of Resolution Copper, which is planning to construct a large copper mine near Superior, Arizona. The proposed mine would destroy the religious and sacred place known as Oak Flat and potentially up to 6,000 hectares of public land. The project includes a controversial and technically problematic deep underground block cave mine 2,134 metres below the surface of Oak Flat. This would create a crater roughly 3,200 metres wide and 300 metres deep due to subsidence of the land. The project has already received much opposition due to its environmental impacts and how it will affect the Indigenous Peoples to whom Oak Flat is sacred.

In March 2026 the US 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed an injunction that had halted the land exchange, and the US Government immediately transferred Oak Flat to Rio Tinto/Resolution Copper. The land transfer marks the first time the United States government has given a Native American sacred site to foreign mining companies and the largest giveaway of recreational rock climbing on public lands. The land transfer does not yet give Rio Tinto/Resolution Copper the necessary permits they need to build the mine, and local communities continue to organise in opposition to this destructive project.

Opposition to lithium mining in Serbia

In 2019, Rio Tinto began developing a lithium mine without transparency in western Serbia. Local farmers were reportedly being pressured to sell their land out of fear of expropriation, amidst growing concerns about water pollution and environmental degradation that the mine would cause. 500,000 petition signatures opposing the project were collected across Serbia and Europe, highlighting widespread environmental and social concerns, reinforced by a 2024 report highlighting major risks to groundwater and soil, alongside biodiversity loss and the accumulation of hazardous waste.

A 2022 government decree cancelling the project has since been annulled. In November 2025 Rio Tinto placed the project on “care and maintenance”, citing a lack of progress in permitting. However, the company have pledged to continue assessing project costs and resources, continuing the state of persistent threat against local communities and nature in the Jadar Valley.

A mine with many problems: Oyu Tolgoi in Mongolia

Oyu Tolgoi is one of the biggest copper and gold reserves in the world, located in the Gobi desert in Mongolia. The Oyu Tolgoi mine is managed and majority owned by Rio Tinto and has threatened pastoralist communities’ traditional lifestyle. In particular, the mine’s extensive water needs have raised serious concerns about water availability in this arid desert region. The company has failed to demonstrate that there is sufficient water available for production and infrastructure, as well as community social needs. The mine was opposed by local nomadic herders who have suffered cultural and economic losses after a seasonal river was destroyed by the construction of the opencast mine. They continue to oppose the mine’s proposed underground expansion and have denounced Rio Tinto for falsely claiming to have resolved all complaints.

Refusing to acknowledge water contamination in Madagascar

Rio Tinto is 80% owner of an ilmenite mine in southern Madagascar operated by a local subsidiary QIT Minerals Madagascar (QMM). In 2013-2014 this mine breached the authorised limits of an environmental buffer zone, which is designed to protect a local estuary system. The statutory buffer limit had already been reduced from 80m to 50m and the mine has since extended even further beyond this. It thus encroached onto the bed of Lake Besaroy in the adjacent estuary system, raising concerns that the mine was leaching radionuclides such as uranium into the local water system.

Independent studies have demonstrated that the QMM mine has contaminated the lakes and rivers where local people fish and collect drinking water. This poses serious health risks to villagers since the water was found to contain elevated levels of uranium and lead approximately 50 times and 40 times higher respectively than WHO guidelines for safe drinking water. After first denying the breach of the environmental buffer zone, Rio Tinto admitted its ‘mistake’ in 2019. However, it continued to claim that the elevated uranium levels were ‘naturally occurring’ and not linked to the mine operation. The company has provided no evidence to support this claim and its own water study analysis has been critiqued for failing to observe standard procedure, due to the omission of existing data. Demands for safe drinking water provision for the locally affected communities have been repeatedly denied.

Blasting a sacred Aboriginal site at Juukan Gorge

One of the biggest recent scandals in the mining sector that shockingly exposed its destructive character was the blasting of a 46,000-year-old sacred site by Rio Tinto in Western Australia in 2020. The global outrage that followed resulted in the resignation of Rio Tinto’s CEO and two other executives. While the company claims to have learned from this mistake and has pledged not to destroy other such heritage sites, there are doubts as to what extent this is just PR. These doubts are confirmed by the company’s insistence on continuing with the Resolution Copper project in Arizona, where it also plans to destroy a sacred site. In response to the destruction at Juukan Gorge, LMN and 34 other organisations called on the Corporate Human Rights Benchmark to strip Rio Tinto of its human rights ranking.