Company: RTNTF
Filing Date: 2025-02-20
Form Type: 20-F
Source: 0001628280-25-006642
Chunk: 71

Company: RIO TINTO LTD
Filing Date: 2025-02-20
Form: 20-F
Chunk 71
---
into.com |

Strategic report | Our approach to ESG | Environment

Land In 2024, we rehabilitated 37 square kilometres (km 2 ) of land, mostly at our bauxite mines in Australia and iron ore mines and exploration areas in the Pilbara, Western Australia. We also developed a geospatial dashboard for internal use that displays each asset’s disturbance and rehabilitation footprint, to help our business better understand the impacts of our land stewardship performance. In Mongolia, we have rehabilitated 2.1km 2 of abandoned mine workings based outside our operational footprint, along valley floors and river beds in the Darkhan-Uul province. This is part of Oyu Tolgoi’s commitment to the Government of Mongolia’s national movement to plant one billion trees by 2030. We built and transitioned to the community 2 tree nurseries in the South Gobi, with a capacity to produce 750,000 saplings a year. We planted one million trees and distributed 80,000 trees to Oyu Tolgoi’s employees, and provided 4 scholarships to students to study forestry. In 2024, our land footprint – total disturbed area – was 1,762 km 2 , a decrease of 51km 2 compared to 2023. This includes all disturbances at our operating assets and activities, such as exploration activities, smelters, mines and supporting infrastructure. Our rehabilitation teams continue to partner with research centres and universities to refine our rehabilitation approaches and improve outcomes. At our bauxite mines and refineries, we have continued trials focusing on transforming stored tailing material into soils that will support plant growth. We also continued trials using satellite and unmanned aerial vehicle-derived data to test methodologies aimed at providing insights to support on-ground monitoring for vegetation and erosion monitoring of rehabilitation. In addition, 13 of our operations completed rehabilitation trials to improve seed germination, erosion and topsoil quality.

| For more informationabout our closurework see page39. |

Waste Waste and residues from our operational activities are key areas of our environmental risk management. In 2024, we continued to focus on managing potential contamination from these sources. At some of our long-life assets, we continue to evaluate waste management practices of the past that have led to a need for remediation in the present. We focus on finding better ways™ to extract maximum value and to transform waste and by-products from our operations into materials the world needs. One example is our work to sustainably extract and produce high-p