Can Mining for Renewable Tech Be Made Sustainable?

Speedy Summary

• The global shift to renewable energy, while beneficial for the climate, necessitates vast quantities of critical minerals like lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, and rare earths.
• Mining these materials is causing important environmental damage and societal issues including deforestation, water scarcity, pollution, forced labor, and child exploitation.
• Major producers of these minerals include Chile (copper & lithium), Indonesia (nickel), the Democratic Republic of Congo (cobalt), and China (rare earths).
• China dominates processing capacity for critical minerals globally-exerting considerable political leverage in international trade and economic policy.
• Innovative technologies like phytomining and electrokinetic mining aim to reduce mining’s ecological impact by extracting metals from waste or polluted soil. Recycling e-waste offers untapped potential due to its rich metal content but remains underutilized due to technical challenges.
• Efforts to explore option sources include deep-sea mining robots trialed in the Pacific Ocean despite environmental opposition; asteroid mining ventures remain speculative but promising with recent improvements in space technologies.

Images:

1. Waste tailings containing cobalt & copper from a mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Pascal Maitre/Panos Pictures).
2. Lithium evaporation pond extraction at Chile’s Atacama desert (PHILIPPE PSAILA/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY).
3. Rainforest destruction caused by nickel mines in Sulawesi (Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images).
4. EV battery production line requiring critical minerals such as lithium & cobalt (Hu Xiaofei/VCG via Getty Images).