Word: rio
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...pound of copper sells for about half what it did five years ago, and cleaning up the environment absorbs many of the resulting pennies. So K.U.C. was pleased to stumble onto an asset that doesn't appear on the balance sheet of its corporate parent, Anglo-Australian mining behemoth Rio Tinto: its own backyard. There, a 4,500-acre community is expected to be built on a reclaimed polluting ground. Wheat grows there...
...project will address the valley's rapid growth and repay some of the environment-related capital expenses Rio Tinto has incurred during its 12-year ownership--a $2 billion total that includes a new, cleaner, $1 billion smelter. Bingham Canyon will wind down in the next 15 years, sticking Rio Tinto with further cleanup bills. The company's half-year returns show that K.U.C. constitutes 15% to 20% of its asset base but generated just 3% to 4% of its $841 million profit. Over the next 20 to 25 years, K.U.C.'s Sunrise could bring Rio Tinto the current equivalent...
That Kennecott can moonlight as a land developer is an extreme example of how new pressures affect the mining business. While analysts uniformly laud Rio Tinto as the standard-bearer for industry responsibility, that's not a standard others agree with. "The corporate poster child for environmental and social abuses" is the way Joshua Karliner of Corp Watch describes Rio Tinto's global activities...
Oscar Groeneveld, CEO of Rio Tinto Copper, defends the company's global progress but says, "We haven't got it 100% right yet. I think we'll be working for a long time before we satisfy the majority of our critics...
There are issues in the U.S. too. In Nevada, where Rio holds a 40% stake in a mine operated and 60% owned by Placer Dome, the Environmental Protection Agency is concerned about groundwater contamination from current mines and the potential for future damage to sacred lands of the Western Shoshone. In Salt Lake Valley, Rio Tinto has paid some $300 million in reclamation costs and is not finished. A 72-sq.-mi. plume of toxins, one of the world's largest, has rendered water from an aquifer beneath Salt Lake City undrinkable. Engineers must halt its spread and prevent public...