Saving Iceland Targets International Aluminium Conference

Today, Sep­tem­ber 25, the 11th Inter­na­tion­al Con­fer­ence on Alu­mini­um Aloys (ICAA) met with angry protests. Activists from the envi­ron­men­tal­ist net­work Sav­ing Ice­land dis­rupt­ed the pro­ceed­ings at the Uni­ver­si­ty in Aachen. Ear­ly this morn­ing, dur­ing one of Rio Tin­to Alcan’s lec­tures, the fire alarms in the build­ing were put on. Lat­er today — again dur­ing Rio Tin­to Alcan’s lec­ture — stink bombs were thrown and a high vol­ume rape alarm was put on and sus­pend­ed out of reach by green and black heli­um baloons. The audi­to­ri­um was also strewn with infor­ma­tion leaflets. The aim was to call atten­tion to the industry’s sin­gu­lar involve­ment in eco­log­i­cal destruc­tion in Ice­land, as well as on a glob­al scale.

The ICAA con­fer­ence is a week­long event held at a dif­fer­ent inter­na­tion­al loca­tion every 2 years. This is its first appear­ance in Ger­many and as such is run in par­al­lel to the Alu­mini­um trade fair in Essen, about 80 km away. This dou­ble event is sure to call togeth­er all major play­ers of an indus­try that still tries to present itself as hav­ing a green con­science, and with some suc­cess: Alcoa has been includ­ed in the Dow Jones Sus­tain­abil­i­ty Index, for the 7th year run­ning. [1] Envi­ron­men­tal­ists dis­pute this depic­tion in the strongest terms.

Glob­al Impacts
“There is no lev­el on which the con­tin­ued expan­sion of the alu­mini­um indus­try can be pur­sued sus­tain­ably” says Andreas Jager of Sav­ing Ice­land,” In India, for exam­ple, the pri­ma­ry mate­r­i­al, baux­ite, is open-cast mined and refined into alu­mi­na, strip­ping rain­fores cov­ered moun­tains, dis­plac­ing trib­al peo­ple from their land and pol­lut­ing the water sup­ply with “red mud” residue [2, 3]. In Aus­tralia and Jamaica, vir­gin forests are also destroyed for the same prize — and with the same tox­ic con­se­quences [4].

Destruc­tion of Ice­landic Wilder­ness, for weapons
“ In Ice­land, the country’s unique nat­ur­al land­scape is being raid­ed for its ener­gy poten­tial by these multi­na­tion­al invaders: at a time when the world is final­ly wak­ing up to cli­mate change, the effect of our high ener­gy depen­dence, the process of alu­mini­um pro­duc­tion requires colos­sal quan­ti­ties of elec­tric­i­ty, for which it plans to block and har­ness every glacial riv­er, exploit every geot­her­mal field and trans­form Iceland’s wild beau­ty into a spent and pol­lut­ed waste­land, dot­ted with smelters. This does not equate to green ener­gy, par­tic­u­lar­ly con­sid­er­ing that the planned Ice­landic alu­mini­um smelters will far exceed the gen­er­ous 1,600,000 tonnes of emis­sions per­mit­ted to that coun­try under the Kyoto Con­ven­tion [5].

“And the end prod­uct? For the most part, mil­i­tary hard­ware used for destruc­tion of every imag­in­able kind, avi­a­tion, which is increas­ing­ly being shown to be incom­pat­i­ble with a sta­ble cli­mate, and dis­pos­able pack­ag­ing, a symp­tom of our waste­ful soci­ety. There can be no future for this indus­try, above all oth­ers, if we are to avoid envi­ron­men­tal cri­sis.”

Rio Tin­to Alcan’s Envi­ron­men­tal and Human Crimes
Sav­ing Ice­land protests Rio Tinto’s invest­ments in Ice­land and in Africa. In Ice­land the RT-Alcan smelter in Haf­nar­fjor­dur, south­west Ice­land is being upgrad­ed to increase pro­duc­tion. The Budarhals dam is cur­rent­ly being con­struct­ed to pow­er the smelter expan­sion.

“The peo­ple of Haf­nar­fjor­dur vot­ed against expan­sion of the smelter in a local ref­er­en­dum, but still pro­duc­tion is being increased,” says Jager. “The smelter dis­cards its tox­ic spent potlin­ings in a land­fill in the sea that floods at high tide [6]. We do not want more pol­lu­tion and we do not want more dams here in Ice­land, which are destroy­ing our beau­ti­ful wilder­ness. Espe­cial­ly for a com­pa­ny with the most abysmal record in human rights,” states Jager.

Rio Tin­to has been accused of sub­ject­ing it’s work­ers to poi­son­ing in mines, of hav­ing secu­ri­ty guards shoot­ing locals look­ing for small amounts of gold in one of it’s mines and hav­ing union-mem­bers spied upon and fired [7, 8]. It has also hired mer­ce­nary forces against local pop­u­la­tions protest­ing it’s oper­a­tions in Papua and Bougainville [9, 10, 11].

The Nor­we­gian gov­ern­ment has sold its shares in Rio Tin­to because it’s Gras­berg mine in West Papua has dev­as­tat­ed the land of the Amungme and Kamoro tribes. Nor­way sold its almost £500 mil­lion shares in Rio Tin­to fol­low­ing rec­om­men­da­tions from its Coun­cil on Ethics to exclude the com­pa­ny from its gov­ern­ment pen­sion fund [12].

Inter­na­tion­al Sol­i­dar­i­ty
Peo­ple all around the world are wak­ing up and becom­ing aware of the destruc­tion caused by the alu­mini­um indus­try, as well as the sit­u­a­tion in Ice­land. Last week, big ban­ners were hanged up in Copen­hagen say­ing: “The Alu­mini­um Indus­try is Destroy­ing All Major Ice­landic Rivers!” [13].

Foot­notes and fur­ther ref­er­ence:

[1] http://savingiceland.puscii.nl/?p=3182&a…
[2] http://savingiceland.puscii.nl/?p=602&am…

[3] http://savingiceland.puscii.nl/?p=2607&a…
[4] http://savingiceland.puscii.nl/?p=2233&a…
[5] http://savingiceland.puscii.nl/?page_id=…
[6] Rio Tin­to Alcan (2008). Alcan Envi­ron­ment: Potlin­ings. http://www.riotintoalcan.is/?PageID=111 [Accessed Sep­tem­ber 24th, 2009].
[7] SBS Aus­tralia (200). Date­line, Report on Rio Tin­to, August 2000.
[8] Asia-Pacif­ic Human Rights Net­work, “Rio Tinto’s Record and the Glob­al Com­pact,” July 13th 2001.
[9] Wikipedia Ger­many (22–7‑2007), http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandline-Af…
[10] Con­tract between PNG Gov­ern­ment and San­d­line: http://coombs.anu.edu.au/SpecialProj/PNG….
[11] Sarei v Rio Tin­to, 456 F.3d 1069 (9th Cir. 2006), USA.
[12] Sur­vival Inter­na­tion­al (2008). Nor­we­gian gov­ern­ment – Rio Tinto’s Papua mine uneth­i­cal. http://www.survival-international.org/ne… [Accessed Sep­tem­ber 24th, 2008]
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