Greenwash Gold 2012 - DOW - BP - Rio Tinto - Olympics Shame

Voting has now closed as the Greenwash Gold 2012 medals have been awarded!

 And the gold is for:

Rio Tinto, BP and Dow



The metal for the 2012 Olympics medals is being provided by Rio Tinto, a massive British mining company.

Metal for the medals will come from the company's Kennecott Bingham Canyon mine in Utah, USA, and its Oyu Tolgoi mine in Mongolia.

Groups in Utah are protesting about air pollution from Rio Tinto's Bingham Canyon operations, which contributes to hundreds of premature deaths each year in the Salt Lake City area. Planned expansion would make the situation worse.

The company's Ranger Uranium Mine in Australia is routinely spilling radioactive water into the surrounding area and is opposed by Aboriginal communities.

In Bougainville, in the Pacific, the company hopes to reopen a copper mine which caused such catastrophic pollution that local people closed it down. Vicious repression of anti-mine protesters by the Government of Papua New Guinea sparked a war.

In the USA, Rio Tinto is accused of violation of Indigenous treaty rights in Michigan, a legacy of pollution in Wisconsin, and planning destructive projects in Alaska and Arizona.

And it has a history of appalling labour relations.

It is a scandal that it should be providing the metal for the London Olympic medals.

BP's brand is all over the Olympics. Incredibly, it has landed the prestigious title of 'Sustainability Partner'.

But BP is one of the most unsustainable companies on the planet. It is entirely focused on extracting every last fossil fuel it can get its hands on, including tar sands, the most destructive industrial project on the planet. 

If the Canadian tar sands are fully exploited as planned, they will contribute more than 10% of all the carbon emissions that humanity can afford to emit, ever, if we are to prevent runaway climate change. Extracting oil from tar sands also destroys swathes of boreal forest, uses huge amounts of fresh water, and causes soaring rates of illness in local communities.

And despite the Deepwater Horizon disaster having permanently destroyed large portions of the Gulf Coast, BP is proudly restarting its deepwater drilling.

It is also exploring the Arctic, where the volatile conditions make a Gulf-like spill both more likely to happen and much harder to control -- and such a disaster would cause unprecedented damage to the fragile ecoystem. 

Oh, and BP recently closed down its solar division, giving up on this essential renewable technology, because it just wasn't profitable enough.

Overall, BP's business plans are based on dangerous scenarios that would lead to a six degree temperature rise and, inevitably, catastrophic climate change.



The Dow Chemical Company has a long, sordid, history of environmental crimes spanning many decades.

They produced Agent Orange to be sprayed on innocent Vietnamese people; they lied about the safety of their products, while people were being poisoned; they bribed officials in order to register banned, dangerous pesticides; and they've regularly poisoned the rivers and the air around their factories. 

After World War II, who do you think employed the Nazi scientist responsible for developing the gas that killed millions of Jews? Step forward Dow Chemical.

Dow GreenwashGoldBut, we are the Bhopal Medical Appeal, and our main issue with Dow is their connection to the 1984 Bhopal Gas disaster and the ongoing chemical contamination that sees, to this day, thousands of people drinking water heavily contaminated with dangerous chemicals.