LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Rio Tinto
built 277 days ago
Judging by Rio Tinto's past record and recent failure to meaningfully improve its practices, this company is not an appropriate spokesperson for corporate responsibility and true commitment to human rights. The Asia Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions should be more discerning in its selection of invited speakers. There are plenty of companies the Forum could have chosen to engage in a genuine discourse on promoting human rights. Unless something changes, the Forum's actions will appear to endorse Rio Tinto and will simply provide another speech Rio Tinto's public relations officials can add to their website.
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Rio Tinto is the world's largest private mining corporation. The company focuses on large, long-term, low cost mining operations in aluminium, copper, coal, uranium, gold, industrial minerals (such as borates, titanium dioxide feedstock, talc, diamonds) and iron ore. Rio Tinto is most active in North America, Australia, South Africa and Indonesia with additional major assets in South America, Asia, and Europe. There are more than 60 operations in around 40 countries.
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Rio Tinto has the distinction of being one of Nevada’s last boomtowns. It ... has the distinction of being named after the Rio Tinto copper mines in Spain that produced ore for 3,000 years. Credit is due a Franklyn Hunt who for years prospected throughout the west. It was Hunt who found traces of copper a few miles south of Mountain City. He filed his claims but no one except the Davidson brothers, Walt and Jack, had faith enough in Hunt to scrub stake him. This they did with the belief their faith in Hunt would someday pay off.
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Reputed to be the oldest mines in the world, Rio Tinto has a particularly rich history. Their mineral wealth was already legendary in ancient times. According to myth, these are the fabled mines of King Solomon, and a section of the area is still known as Cerro Salomón today. The nearby villages of Zalamea la Vieja (now called Nerva) and Zalamea la Real are ... named after the biblical king. It was tales of the Iberian Peninsula's mineral wealth that drew Phoenician merchants to its shores, laying the foundations for a succession of Greek, Carthaginian and Roman invasions. The Rio Tinto mines they worked so intensively were among the most prized rewards that control of Iberia yielded.
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The Rio Tinto holds a significant role in history as the birthplace of the Copper Age and Bronze Age. The first Rio Tinto mines were developed in 3000 b.c. by the Iberians and Tartessans. Tales of mineral wealth (gold, silver, and copper) drew the Phoenicians (2800 b.p. – 2600 b.p.) and then the Romans (2000 b.p. - 1800 b.p.), who made some of the first coins from Rio Tinto’s silver and gold. Other cultures, including the Visigoths (1600 b.p. – 1300 b.p.) and the Moors (1300 b.p. to 500 b.p.), eventually abandoned the mines. The mines were rediscovered by Spain in 1556 and reopened in 1724, only to be sold to the British in 1871. They are now one of the most important sources of copper and sulfur in the world.
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Rio Tinto is... more than an isolated cavity on the earth's surface. Its growth has consumed not only mountains and valleys but even entire villages, whose populations had to be resettled in specially built towns nearby. Named after the river which flows through the region-itself named for the reddish streaks that colour its water-Rio Tinto has become a landscape within a landscape. The unearthed minerals give the soil and waters of the region odd, otherworldly shades of blue, green, yellow, red and brown, so it is not unusual to see bright orange or green rivulets trickling past. The predominant ores, however, are the ferrous ones, which oxidise when they come into contact with the air and colour land and river alike in shades of reddish brown. Even as far as Niebla, roughly 50 kilometres to the south-east, the waters of the Rio Tinto still flow past the town's ancient fortified walls in an eerie trickle of blood-red.
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