Billiton acquired the Colombian Govt company`s 50% share in El Cerrejon mine in consortium with Anglo American and Glencore. This is one of the largest open-pit coal mines in the world. Mining operations began in 1985, at exactly the same time as the underground coal...
BHP acquired full ownership of the Cerro Matoso ferro-nickel mine in Colombia but was involved in extraction from the start in 1982. In the 1990s evidence started to emerge of the devastating health impacts on local indigenous (Zenú and Embera) and African-descent...
The Salar de Atacama and Punta Negra (salt flat and high-Andean wetlands) are two ecosystems located in the middle of a desert in Chile. These have been damaged by over-exploitation of water and pollution caused by Minera Escondida, BHP’s biggest mining project in the...
BHP began construction of Ok Tedi copper and gold mine in Papua New Guinea. Operations began in 1984 and the company dumped untreated mining waste into the river system. More than 2,000 square kilometres of forest has been damaged or destroyed by mine tailings...
Mt Newman Iron Ore Mine started production. In 2009, Kerry and Diana Robinson, representatives of the Marapikurrinya people, began the process of successfully challenging a government attempt to deregister a sacred site at Port Hedland where the iron ore is shipped...
