Barcarena, Brazil
Hydro Alunorte is the world's largest alumina refinery and has nearly 1,900 permanent employees. Production at Hydro Alunorte started in 1995 and after three expansions now has a total capacity of over six million metric tonnes. Hydro is the main shareholder (91 percent).
Albras is one of the largest aluminium metal smelters in Brazil with 1,200 permanent employees.
Hydro has aluminium operations in Barcarena in the state of Pará in Brazil. The city has 100,000 inhabitants and many of them have a low education level. The company has cooperated with the municipality in two programs to improve the educational performance in Barcarena.
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Bel Air, Guinea
Alufer places a great deal of importance on sustainability and has adopted the IFC Performance Standards and Equator Principles as best practice for the Bel Air mine. Environmental baseline monitoring has been ongoing since commencing exploration back in 2011 and the project is regularly audited for compliance. Bel Air was awarded the certificate of Environmental Conformity by the Government of Guinea in 2013 and this has been renewed on an annual basis since then.
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Juruti, Brazil
The Juruti Mine is located in the west of the State of Pará, in the heart of the Amazon forest. Juruti is an old township, dating back some 126 years, and according to data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) 2010, it has 46,000 inhabitants, of which 65% live in the 150 rural communities that predominate in the region. Its economy has been traditionally based on the growing of manioc, fishing, livestock farming and gathering from nature. With reserves of around 700 million metric tonnes, Juruti has one of the world’s largest deposits of high grade bauxite.
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Weipa, Australia
Commercial quantities of bauxite were discovered on Aboriginal lands at Weipa in western Cape York in 1955. Nine years later commercial production began, with 453,365 tonnes of bauxite mined and shipped that year. By 2009, this annual production figure had increased to 16.3 million tonnes, mined by 745 full time employees.
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