Alcoa lied about jarrah forest rehabilitation: advertising watchdog

Australia's advertising watchdog has ruled that Alcoa's claims to have rehabilitated 75 per cent of the WA jarrah forest it had strip-mined are unclear, overstated, without a reasonable basis, and not truthful or factual.

The decision, made after a referral to Ad Standards by three environmental groups, is a crushing blow to the US miner's expensive public relations blitz in WA to shore up support for its current mining and a planned expansion that the state's Environmental Protection Authority is assessing.

A month ago, the WA Forest Alliance (WAFA), the Conservation Council of WA, and The Wilderness Society lodged complaints with industry body Ad Standards alleging Alcoa has breached its Environmental Claims Code with claims about forest rehabilitation and the water supply.

Ad Standards upheld the rehabilitation complaint on August 20 and published it on Monday.

WA senior campaigner Jason Fowler said West Australians love the Northern Jarrah Forest.

"It’s such a unique and special place," he said.

“Ongoing clearing of the Northern Jarrah Forest is recognised internationally as reducing the resilience and adaptive capacity of the forest, increasing the risk of collapse in a changing climate,

"Alcoa wants to continue with its destruction, and has tried to deceive us while it does so.” 

The watchdog found individual claims in Alcoa's advertising combined to "form an impression that 75 per cent of the cleared jarrah forest has already been rehabilitated into a self-sustaining forest and has recovered from mining" and that "these efforts are above what is required to achieve compliance with government regulation."

It concluded Alcoa had breached four of the five sections of its Environmental Claims Code:

1 - Claims were not truthful and factual and likely to be misleading or deceptive to the targeted audience.

2 - Alcoa did not have reasonable grounds to make the claims.

3 - Claims were not clear, specific and failed to include important limitations.

4 - The environmental claims were overstated.

Alcoa did not breach a fifth section requiring environmental claims about future objectives to be based on reasonable grounds, as its debunked claims were about past performance.

Alcoa has been making the now-rebutted claim since at least early 2023 and chief executive Bill Oplinger repeated the rehabilitation lie to investors as recently as July.

Alcoa's response in the published decision was that the advertisement "had already been discontinued per the original schedule, and there are no plans for the advertisement to be used again in future."

An Alcoa spokesman said it used the language of mining industry-accepted definitions "though acknowledges that some people may have interpreted this differently."

"Based on the Ad Standards decisions, future advertising material will be updated accordingly," he said.

Alcoa in WA: 60 years, 28,000 hectares of forest cleared, zero rehabilitation completed

The department of conservation says Alcoa has not met the rehabilitation completion criteria, but the miner claims it has rehabilitated 75 per cent of the forest it has cleared.

WAtodayPeter Milne

The decision comes 2½ years after WAtoday exposed the truth of Alcoa's rehabilitation performance: after 60 years of mining that had destroyed 280 square kilometres of jarrah forest, Alcoa had not completed rehabilitation on a single hectare.

Alcoa has been completing the first 18 months of work in rehabilitating a forest - replacing top soil, contouring the land, and planting seeds and seedlings - and advertising it as "rehabilitated."

Ads that have been found to breach the code in the past include Hancock Energy, oil and gas lobby group Australin Energy Producers, and the owner of Perth's retail gas network ATCO, who all made claims about the benefits of gas.

Water unaffected so far but at high risk

The environmental groups also lodged a complaint about Alcoa advertising that it had never impacted Perth's water supply. Ad Standards ruled in favour of the miner on this issue.

Since the risk from Alcoa's clearing to the dams inland of Perth that supply the city drinking water became public knowledge in 2023, the miner's standard response to the issue has been that it has not caused any problems to date.

This factual statement is not particularly relevant as in recent years the area of cleared forest has grown substantially and is much closer to Serpentine Dam - Perth's largest. The miner is also increasingly mining in hilly areas where runoff that could contaminate the dam is more likely.

However, Alcoa did commission engineering consultancy GHD to consider the risk its mining posed to the water supply to more than two million people.

The global firm identified 22 ways that Alcoa's strip mining of bauxite could contaminate the water supply, and concluded that 21 of these pathways were high risk.

Perth’s water supply at ‘high risk’ from Alcoa bauxite mining, expert study finds

Exclusive: GHD identified contamination threats to dams inland of Perth from sewage, oil spills, and soil erosion

The GuardianPeter Milne

In the past 12 months, Alcoa has also breached conditions imposed on it designed to protect the water catchments and endangered cockatoos.

The demolition of Alcoa's defence of its forest rehabilitation has come just when the company needs public support in the state that provides more than 70 per cent of its global bauxite and alumina production.

The EPA has received a record 59,000 submissions on Alcoa's plans for its current mining and an expansion that needs another 114 square kilometres of jarrah forest to be destroyed.

UPDATED 8PM: Alcoa and WAFA comments added.