In the 1950s, the political situation made it increasingly difficult for mostly British and French owners to extract profits from Spanish operations, and the company decided to dispose of the mines from which it took its name.

[25] That year, Rio Tinto also bought North Limited and Ashton Mining for US$4 billion, adding additional resources in aluminium, iron ore, diamonds and coal.

[38] According to the agreement, Simfer would pay US$700 million and receive mining concession and government approval of the proposed Chalco and Rio Tinto Simandou joint venture.

[41] On 13 December 2011, an independent arbitrator cleared the way for Rio Tinto, which had owned 49% of Ivanhoe Mines (now known as Turquoise Hill Resources), to take it over: he said the $16 billion Canadian group's "poison pill" defence was not valid.

[43] In October 2013, Rio Tinto agreed to sell its majority stake in Australia's third-largest coal mine to Glencore and Sumitomo for a little over US$1 billion, as part of the firm's plans to focus on larger operations.

[46] In March 2022, Rio Tinto completed the acquisition of Rincon Mining's lithium project in Argentina for $825 million, following approval by Australia's Foreign Investment Review Board.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government-owned resources group Chinalco and the US aluminium producer Alcoa purchased 12% of Rio Tinto's London-listed shares in a move that would block or severely complicate BHP Billiton's plans to buy the company.

[55] On 1 February 2009, Rio Tinto management announced it was in talks to receive a substantial equity infusion from Chinalco, a major Chinese state-controlled[56] mining enterprise, in exchange for ownership interest in certain assets and bonds.

The company also produces other metals and minerals as by-products from the processing of its main resources, including gold, silver, molybdenum, sulphuric acid, nickel, potash, lead and zinc.

[4] Rio Tinto controls gross assets of $81 billion in value across the globe, with main concentrations in Australia (35%), Canada (34%), Europe (13%) and the United States (11%), and smaller holdings in South America (3%), Africa (3%) and Indonesia (1%).

One person particularly bothered by this decision was the Commissioner of the London Games, Meredith Alexander, who quit her position and led a coalition of human rights and environmental groups during the "Greenwashed Gold Campaign".

[107] In 2022, Rio Tinto released a report that described a work culture of bullying, harassment and racism at the global mining giant, including twenty one complaints by women of actual or attempted rape or sexual assault in the past five years.

[110] The Australian Human Rights Commission found that, from 2015 and 2020, approximately three in four women had experienced at least some form of sexual harassment while in the mining industry, in part due to a gender imbalance.

[127] Also on 9 July, The Corporate Human Rights Benchmark (CHRB) and the World Benchmarking Alliance (WBA) condemned "the destruction of invaluable cultural heritage at Juukan Gorge", adding that this "incident is a severe adverse impact on cultural rights that has engendered extreme concern and outrage among the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura traditional owners of the site as well as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and their allies".

The CHRB and WBA also called "on Rio Tinto to take appropriate action to carry out an independent investigation of the incident, involving affected stakeholders, to provide effective remedy and to prevent similar impacts in the future, in Australia and elsewhere".

[133] Rio Tinto admitted their error, issued an apology via media[134] and on their website, and also committed to building relationships with the traditional owners as well as getting Indigenous people into leadership roles in the company.

[145] In December 2021, Rio Tinto said it was considering the concerns of residents in western Serbia after Loznica's municipal assembly scrapped a plan to allocate land for a lithium project.

The Serbian public was not pleased with that turn of events, despite the president stating multiple times that the company, alongside the EU, was guaranteeing a higher level of environmental safety, following the protests in 2021.

[155] After the former Panguna copper and gold mine in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, which was abandoned by Rio Tinto in 1989, caused flooding, pollution of water wells and river poisoning, residents of the region filed a request for investigation with the Australian government in September 2020.

[156] As part of a rider of the National Defense Authorization Act, the United States agreed in 2014 to hand over Oak Flat in Arizona to a joint venture of Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton to build the Resolution Copper mine.

The proposal has faced significant backlash from environmentalists and the Apache tribe, arguing that the project, if it goes forward, would collapse a region two miles (3.2 km) wide around Oak Flat into a sinkhole 1,100 feet (340 m) deep, destroying sacred and ecologically sensitive land.

[160] In March 2018, Rio Tinto was urged by institutional investors to set new rules requiring the company to adhere to the goals of the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 °C, including detailed plans to reduce scope 1 to 3 emissions.

[161] Rio Tinto's top executives rejected the resolution, arguing that the company had made a lot of progress in reducing its greenhouse gas emissions and that appropriate plans were in place to deal with climate change.

This is to be achieved through 5 GW of wind and solar projects for the Boyne Island and Tomago smelters and 1 GW for Pilbara mining, full electrification of the Pilbara system including all trucks, mobile equipment and rail operations, replacing gas, and investments into green steel and aluminium, joining fellow iron ore giants Fortescue Metals and BHP in the effort to transition to renewable powered operations.

[175] The British antipoverty charity War on Want has also criticised Rio Tinto for its complicity in the serious human rights violations which have occurred near the mines it operates in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.

[188] On 29 March 2010 four Rio Tinto employees including Australian citizen Stern Hu were found guilty of these charges and of accepting millions of dollars in bribes.

The allegations centre around the payment of a $10.5 million bribe to François de Combret [fr], a French banking consultant who was a friend and adviser of President Alpha Condé.

Rio Tinto also declared they would cooperate with all related investigations and fired two top executives in connection with the matter, one of whom was head of energy and minerals, Alan Davies,[194] who led the Simandou operation in 2011.

[203][204] On 6 March 2023, the US SEC announced charges against Rio Tinto plc for violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) arising out of a bribery scheme involving a consultant in Guinea.

Following the impairment charge, which included an additional $11 billion in asset write-downs, chief executive officer of Rio Tinto, Tom Albanese stepped down from his post and left the company.