Alcoa pays Australian feds $36 million for ‘unlawful’ forest clearing

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Pittsburgh-based Alcoa will pay the Australian government a settlement the company put at $36 million for “unlawfully” clearing tracts of endangered forest without approvals between 2019 and 2025.

The metals giant began mining bauxite — the raw ingredient for aluminum — from beneath Australia’s Northern Jarrah forest in the 1960s, but its footprint has swelled in recent years, drawing new scrutiny from regulators and the public.

Senator Murray Watt, Australia’s environment and water minister, said the payment — $55 million in Australian dollars — settles a longstanding question of whether Alcoa should enjoy exemptions from federal environmental processes.

“We are committed to responsible operations and welcome this important step in transitioning our approvals to a contemporary assessment process that provides increased certainty for our operations and our people into the future,” Alcoa President and CEO William F. Oplinger said in a statement. “We’re proud of our more than 60 years as a leading Australian aluminum producer and the role we are now playing in support of critical minerals production.”

“It’s well and truly the largest amount that’s been paid by way of an enforceable undertaking around the environment laws nationally,” Watt said in an interview with Australian broadcasters Feb. 18.

Alcoa maintains it has complied with federal law but agreed to the payments to “acknowledge historical clearing.”

The agreement includes an 18-month exemption for the company to operate while seeking those approvals.

Last year, Pittsburgh’s Public Source traveled to Australia to investigate Alcoa’s plans for the forest, environmental effects and community concerns.

Alcoa, a global metalmaker valued at $16 billion, mines about 34 million metric tons of bauxite annually to generate 9 million tons of alumina. Much of this is sourced from its vast mine sites in the Northern Jarrah Forest near Perth. The endangered forest is a recognized biodiversity hotspot and hosts threatened species including black cockatoos and a variety of marsupials.

The company runs a rehabilitation program to restore former mined sites, but a prominent botanist who once tried to aid those efforts now maintains it’s ineffective, and a growing chorus of Australian scientists join those criticisms.

Advertisements the company sponsored last summer promoting its rehabilitation program drew the attention of an ad standards watchdog, which issued a report stating “the advertisement was inaccurate and likely to mislead or deceive target consumers.”

Alcoa is still tussling with regulators in the state of Western Australia.

A proposal there to massively expand its operations drew some 60,000 public comments upon submission to the Environmental Authority last summer. Local governments encompassing the mining and refining sites and multiple First Nations representatives were among the critics. The decision is still pending, though Alcoa wrote in a statement to Public Source that the company responded to the “comments received from government entities” and remains “committed to working toward the decision by the end of 2026.”

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This story was originally published by Pittsburgh’s Public Source and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.