Company: RTNTF
Filing Date: 2025-02-20
Form Type: 20-F
Source: 0001628280-25-006642
Chunk: 78

Company: RIO TINTO LTD
Filing Date: 2025-02-20
Form: 20-F
Chunk 78
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 ownership structures, we endeavour to work in partnership with other asset owners to ensure we consider closure through asset design, planning and operations. A Closure Steering Committee, with senior representatives from across our business and chaired by Kellie Parker, Chief Executive Australia, provides oversight to our approach and finds opportunities for improvements and alignment across the business. We actively manage risk and find commercial opportunities within our portfolio. In 2024: – We sold our interests in Sweetwater, a former uranium legacy site in Wyoming, US, for cash proceeds of $175 million. This supports the local economy with a new owner who is actively expanding operations in the region. – We signed an agreement with Alteo for Rio Tinto to be the last operator of the Mange-Garri bauxite residue disposal area in France to manage rehabilitation and support repurposing. Alteo will continue to operate and retain responsibility for the Gardanne refinery. Through targeted research and development, we work to solve the challenges of the future to reduce our liabilities and create better outcomes. We continued partnering with research and academic organisations, start-ups and technology solutions providers to find better ways to close and repurpose our assets. These include opportunities to reprocess mineral and industrial residues, selectively recover minerals from mine-influenced waters, augment our knowledge base for closure, and improve the rehabilitation and revegetation execution and monitoring. – We have been progressing our research and development program, seeking to remediate and unlock value from our mine-influenced waters. The initiative rethinks widely established chemical water treatment practices. It explores instead the possibility of extracting selected constituents, including potentially high-value ones, in a high-quality form that can be commercialised. We are building a testbed facility at our Kennecott copper operations in Utah, US, to conduct the first technology trials in a real environment. – We started a project with the University of Queensland to develop new ways to monitor mine residues using drones and ground sensors, improving safety and land rehabilitation across mine sites. – We initiated a broad-acre field trial investigating the scalability of converting bauxite tailings into technosol, a growth medium used for rehabilitation. The objective is to provide an alternative to imported topsoil during progressive rehabilitation activities. The trial builds on previous greenhouse studies and incorporates local knowledge to define success criteria. – We are developing digital tools that help us track our progress and predict trajectories towards rehabilitation and closure completion criteria on mine sites, and combine in situ and remote sensing.

| For more informationabout our closurerisks see page