Saving Iceland

Very positive sounding news from South Africa. Rio Tinto-Alcan’s plans to construct a smelter 20km away from Port Elizabeth seem to be cracking as the countries largest energy provider, Eskom, announce the need to review their ability to supply Rio Tinto-Alcan with energy. It seems that delaying the project of purposely building Rio Tinto-Alcan a new power station until 2013 and paying them the subsequent breach of contract fines would be cheaper than going ahead with the project now. This following Rio Tinto-Alcan’s investment to date of over $200million in the ‘Coega’ project and their CEO Tom Albanese having stated only two months ago: “To describe the project as having tremendous momentum would be an understatement.” Read More

An IPS/SEEN/TNI report, 2001

This important and lengthy report from the Washington based Sustainable Energy and Economy Network is highly informative about the operational structure of the aluminum industry and the resulting impacts on human rights and the environment.

• See also: IRN Aluminium toolkit – Foiling the Aluminum Industry: A Toolkit for Communities, Activists, Consumers, and Workers
• Frumvinnsla áls – Lýsing á hinni mengandi og orkufreku framleiðslu álbarra. Þýtt úr “Foiling the Aluminum Industry”

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Jamaica Bauxite Environmental Organization – Excellent video section showing the horrors of the mining of bauxite…

By Jaap Krater, Miriam Rose and Mark Anslow, The Ecologist, October 2007.

The gates of a geothermal power station are not where you would expect to find environmental activists. But the morning of 26th July 2007 saw the access road to Hellisheidi power station in Hengill, South-West Iceland, blockaded by a group of protestors from the campaign group ‘Saving Iceland’. After a brief demonstration, nine activists were arrested and several now face legal action.

Geothermal power in Iceland is big business. Just five plants generate 3 TWh a year – more than the annual output from all the UK’s wind turbines combined (Orkustofnun 2005; BERR 2006). Geothermal power also provides at least 85 per cent of Iceland’s homes with heat and hot water. This abundance of cheap, largely CO2-free energy has attracted energy-hungry industries to the country like sharks to a carcass. Of these, by far the most energy intensive is the aluminium industry (Krater 2007; Saving Iceland 2007).
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30th August 2007
From Mines and Communities

The world’s second-highest capitalised mining company has made a giant leap forward (some might think, backwards [sic]) by agreeing a friendly acquisition of Alcan, Canada’s premier integrated aluminium producer. Only an extraordinary shareholders meeting, scheduled for September 14th, stands in the company’s way of becoming the world’s major player in this field: the outcome is virtually certain.

Underwriting the deal’s syndicated US40 billion loan – claimed by Rio Tinto as the largest ever raised in the UK and fourth biggest in the world – are three major investment banks, RBS (UK), Deutsche Bank (Germany) and Credit Suisse (Switzerland). Read More

Rio targets being top player in aluminium
By Nigel Wilson

August 08, 2007 06:00am
Article from: The Australian

RIO TINTO aims to be the world’s biggest aluminium producer – with the help of some of the world’s cheapest energy – before the end of the decade.

Rio Tinto Aluminium chief executive Oscar Groeneveld said yesterday that the possibility of a new aluminium smelter in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, coupled with closer links with Abu Dhabi once the Rio Tinto/Alcan merger was completed, would create a leading world player in the aluminium business. Read More

7 August 2007

Today lovers of nature almost danced on the graves of ALCOA, ALCAN, Century and Elkem when a mysterious power “thump” in the national grid managed to knock out power to all their factories!

At around 3pm today a power surge which originated from around the Hvalfjordur region (where Century and Elkem run their aluminium-cancer and alloys factories), created such a surge that all power to the west, north and east of Iceland was brought down, even Reykjavik’s for a split second. Energy was not restored to the heavy industry factories for a number of hours. Unfortunately, whilst we were counting the minutes these factories were offline, we are told that the pots of molten aluminium did not cool down enough to destroy them entirely.
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30 July 2007

The Earth Liberation Front sent Saving Iceland the following statement:

“In the early hours of 30/07/07, saboteurs struck at Smurfit Kappa, a plastics factory owned by Rio Tinto Alcan in Chelmsford, Essex. The gates were locked shut, office doors and loading bays were sabotaged with glue and a message left painted on the wall. Vehicles belonging to Rio Tinto were also sabotaged…”
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Iceland Review
07/26/2007

The aluminum company Alcan in Iceland has decided to sue activists who, on behalf of the campaign group Saving Iceland, broke into Alcan’s premises in Straumsvík, near Hafnarfjördur, on Tuesday and chained themselves to machines.

“To get the kids out, the company’s equipment had to be damaged,” Alcan’s finance director, Sigurdur Thór Ásgeirsson, told Morgunbladid. “They had chained themselves to a gate, rails and machines, and because the chains were around their necks we didn’t dare saw them off.”

Ásgeirsson added the smelter’s operations had been delayed because of the protests.

Alcan’s lawyers were asked to review the case yesterday and in the following days it will be decided how many protesters will be sued and on which charges. Thirteen individuals, most of them foreign citizens, were arrested on Tuesday, and about 20 protesters in total participated in Saving Iceland’s actions on Alcan’s premises.

The 13 protestors who were arrested have now been released. According to police, the case is still under investigation and the individuals may be facing deportation.

According to law, foreign citizens can be deported if they have been convicted for a crime or served a sentence in another country, if the crime they were convicted of would result in imprisonment in Iceland for more than three months.

Hafnarfjordur
26 July 2007

Locals in Hafnarfjordur protested on Thursday against the Council’s attempts to betray the results of the local referendum in March about the enlargement of the ALCAN smelter which is situated in nearby Straumsvik.

In spite of a massive PR campaign paid for by ALCAN (including an illegal gathering by ALCAN of personal data about individuals in Hafnarfjordur) the majority of the inhabitants rejected the enlargement.

After the referendum both ALCAN and the Mayor of Hafnarfjordur, Ludvik Geirsson, issued a series of contradictory statements claiming that the results of the referendum were not legally binding.

Later they surfaced with the idea that the referendum only applied to a planning permission of a certain spot by the existing factory and that nothing could stop it being built on a landfill on the other side of the factory. (1)

The locals dropped two different banners. One stating that ‘NO MEANS NO – ENLARGEMENT IS CRIMINAL’ and the other saying ‘NIETSCHE KILLED GOD – LUDVIK KILLED DEMOCRACY’.

Saving Iceland wish to congratulate the inhabitants of Hafnarfjordur for their continuing opposition to the evil that has now metamorphised into Rito Tinto-ALCAN.

1.- See: ALCAN and Mayor decide: To Hell with Democracy in Hafnarfjördur!

See also: Celebration as Hafnarfjörður rejects Alcan expansion!