updated April 2021
Introduction
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 second-largest mining company in the world after BHP, with its market value exceeding $140 billion in 2020. It has 60 operations and projects in 36 different countries around the world as shown in the map below, its commodities include aluminium, iron ore, copper, and diamonds. While the company claims to ‘produce materials essential to human progress’, its operations include a multitude of violations of human rights and various forms of environmental degradation detrimental to human progress.
Source: https://www.riotinto.com/operations
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 currently 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 still refuses 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. As one of its last acts, however, the Trump administration sped up the process of the land transfer by a year resulting in an outcry and hundreds of groups urging President Biden to revoke the deal. Resolution Copper claims to have the legal right to construct the mine according to plan, while denying that the area is culturally significant and refusing to demonstrate the infeasibility of alternative mining methods.
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 partially 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 the project’s 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. Moreover, Rio Tinto continues to refuse to carry out an Environmental and Social Impact Assessment which is needed after major changes in the design of the underground mine and tailings facility. Questions regarding the mine’s environmental and water impacts were raised again at the 2020 AGM but were left unanswered. The expansion project has also caused trouble for Rio Tinto as it has been delayed by two years while costing $1.5 billion more than expected. This has prompted the Mongolian government, who is one-third owner of the mine, to consider cancelling the project.
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 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 latest 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 2020’s biggest 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. 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 to what extent this is just PR. These doubts are confirmed by the company’s insistence on continuing with the Resolution Copper project described above. 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.
Further resources
Alternative timeline – a timeline of conflicts and controversies since Rio Tinto’s founding
Cut and Run – 2020 report on Rio Tinto’s destructive legacy in Bougainville and West Papua
Martial Mining – 2020 report on the links between extractivism and militarism, including Rio Tinto’s role in them.
