CHAPTER ONE
The rare metals curse
‘WHAT DO YOU WANT? YOU HAVE NO BUSINESS HERE!’ A MAN IN HIS FORTIES pulls up to us in a black Audi, and stares at us menacingly. He is joined by a companion, equally menacing, and soon another man on a motorbike also pulls up. ‘You need to leave, it’s dangerous. We don’t want any trouble!’ The three men start to lose their cool; the tension is palpable. ‘Get lost!’ shouts the man in the Audi. He can tell that I am trying to buy time by my furtive glances at the tent erected incongruously on the hillside.
‘People still work here,’ whispered Wang Jing, a former miner and my scout. ‘I was sure they’d closed these quarries ages ago!’ The scatter of new equipment and evacuation pipes in the area confirm my doubts. Two hundred metres away, the telltale tent stands above the tailing ponds and disembowelled rocky landscape. There can be no doubt that rare metal–refining activities are taking place at this camp. Where are they extracting the minerals from? ‘From the mines all around us, but also from the enormous illegal quarries flanking the hill’, Wang Jing explains.
Two days earlier that July in 2016, I had landed at the tiny airport of Ganzhou, a town in the Chinese province of Jiangxi some 700 kilometres south of Beijing. From there, I drove due south for hours on battered roads, hemmed in by row upon row of rice paddies, to reach the mines. The last few dozen kilometres took me along little more than ribbons of asphalt, weaving between rickshaws and trailers laden with rubble, and women wearing the traditional câo mào conical hat. Out of the foothills of the Nan Kang mountains burst lotus forests and palm trees — a lush and abundant organic kingdom of stifling foliage pushing into the blue sky.
I was also in the biggest rare metals mining area on the planet.
Rare metals: a definition
When it comes to raw materials, nature can be surprisingly generous or deeply parsimonious. Alongside popular species such as the poplar and pine are rare trees like the hairy quandong in Australia or the ghost orchid in the UK. Tulips may very well overflow the fields of Holland, but other flowers, such as the butterfly orchid, barely make an appearance in flower shops in the Netherlands. In these parts, the skies abound with birds like the mallard — much to the delight of hunters across Western Europe. Then there are the more discreet, rarely sighted birds like the California condor in North America.
Similarly, abundant metals like iron, copper, zinc, aluminium, and lead coexist with a family of some thirty rare metals.1 The lists published by the United States Geological Survey, an agency of the United States Department of the Interior, and by the European Commission are an education in themselves: light and heavy rare-earth elements, germanium, tungsten, antimony, niobium, beryllium, gallium, cobalt, vanadium, tantalum, and other rare metals.2
They share the following traits:
Rare metals: drivers of new energies
Since the dawn of time, humans have sought to transform sources of natural energy (such as wind, thermal, and solar) into mechanical energy. Take the windmill, for instance. Its vanes and rotor are driven by wind energy to actuate a mechanical mill that then crushes olives or grain. In the steam engine, thermal energy transported by steam from water is converted, using pistons, into mechanical energy powerful enough to drive a locomotive. Thermal energy is also generated by the combustion of fuel to drive the pistons of a vehicle and set it in motion. In essence, we have been making movement-generating machines for centuries.4 The more we multiply the possibilities of movement, the more we can travel and trade, entrust new tasks to machines and robots, and make productivity gains — and therefore greater profits.
Energy needs to be both abundant and inexpensive to ensure that machines run efficiently — a challenge we must overcome to satisfy our economic-growth ambitions. Thus, for almost three centuries we have been working tirelessly at developing new engines with increasingly impressive power-to-weight ratios: the more compact and less resource-intensive they are, the greater their mechanical energy output.
Enter rare metals. While mineralogists have known of their existence since the eighteenth century, they garnered little interest while their industrial applications remained undiscovered. But from the 1970s, humans began to exploit the exceptional magnetic properties of some of these metals to make super magnets.5
An electrical charge coming into contact with the magnetic field of a magnet generates a force that creates movement. The smallest of these magnets is barely the size of a pinhead, while the biggest magnet ever designed is four metres high, weighs 132 tonnes, and is located at the Saclay Nuclear Research Centre in the Paris region.6 Irrespective of their size, magnets are now — to a vast majority of electric engines — what pistons have been to steam and internal-combustion engines. Magnets have made it possible to manufacture billions of engines, both big and small, capable of executing certain repetitive movements in our stead — whether it be running a motorbike, powering a train, making an electric toothbrush or mobile phone vibrate, operating an electric window, or launching an elevator to the top of the tallest skyscraper.
Without realising it, our societies have become completely magnetised. To say that the world would be significantly slower without magnets containing rare metals is not an understatement.7 Remember that the next time you stop to admire your holiday magnets on the fridge!
The technological revolution behind the energy shift
Electric engines did more than make humanity infinitely more prosperous; they made the energy transition a plausible hypothesis. Thanks to them, we have discovered our ability to maximise movement — and therefore wealth — without the use of coal and oil. It is not surprising that electric engines will soon replace conventional engines. Electric engines are already being used to propel ships, send the Solar Impulse aircraft around the world, launch space probes and satellites, and put enough electric cars on the roads to disrupt the automotive market.8
Of course, these engines run off electric batteries that create the electricity needed to activate the magnets. The difference, however, is that with rare metals it is possible to generate clean energy: they cause the rotors of certain wind turbines9 to turn and convert the sun’s rays into electricity using solar panels.10 Because they remove pollution from most of the energy cycle — from manufacture to end use — we can safely envisage a world without nuclear, oil-fired, or coal-fired power plants.
But that is merely scratching the surface of rare metals, for they possess a wealth of other chemical, catalytic, and optical properties that make them indispensable to myriad green technologies.11 An entire book could be written on the details of their characteristics alone. They make it possible to trap car-exhaust fumes in catalytic converters, ignite energy-efficient light bulbs,12 and design new, lighter, and hardier industrial equipment, improving the energy efficiency of cars and planes. Two thousand years ago, the Hebrews were able to cross the Sinai desert surviving on manna, the providential food sent from heaven. Today, another godsend — this time from underground — has been laid out at the ecological banquet, for there is a rare metal for every green application. Surely there is a green guardian angel watching over us.
Most surprising is how these metals have become indispensable to new information and communication technologies for their semiconducting properties that regulate the flow of electricity in digital devices. And the once-distinct functions of green and digital technologies are beginning to converge. Indeed, increasingly sophisticated software and algorithms used in ‘smart grids’ make it possible to regulate fluctuations in the flow of electricity between producers and consumers. This is precisely what the 80 million smart meters already installed in the US are doing. In the smart cities of tomorrow, which will combine green and digital technologies, we will save up to 65 per cent of the electricity we use today, thanks to sensor-embedded streets that adjust the lighting to foot traffic, while weather-prediction software makes solar panels 30 per cent more efficient.
Thus, digitalisation and the energy transition are co-dependent. Digital technology advances and enhances the impacts of green tech. Their combination is ushering in an era of energy abundance, stimulating new industries, and has already created 10 million jobs worldwide.13 This is a boon not lost on political leaders: to help these new markets take off, Europe is now urging its member states to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions by 40 per cent (in relation to 1990 levels) by 2030, and to increase to 27 per cent the renewable-energy share of their energy consumption.
But why stop there? A 2015 report by the Royal Society of Chemistry confirmed it was economically and technically feasible for the US to rely only on renewable-energy sources by 2050.14 In 2019, Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defended the very same objective under the ‘Green New Deal’.15
The acceleration of rare metal consumption
This technological diversification has multiplied the types of metals that humanity uses. Between the ages of antiquity and the Renaissance, human beings consumed no more than seven metals;16 this increased to a dozen metals over the twentieth century; to twenty from the 1970s onwards; and then to almost all eighty-six metals on Mendeleev’s periodic table of elements. (See Appendix 1.)
Our appetite for metals boomed — and it didn’t stop there. On the one hand, consumption of the three main sources of energy currently used in the world (coal, oil, and gas) tends to stabilise, decrease, or, at best, moderately increase.17 On the other hand, the potential demand for rare metals is exponential. We are already consuming over two billion tonnes of metals every year — the equivalent of more than 500 Eiffel Towers a day.18 (See Appendix 2 to see the trends in world primary metal production.) By 2035, demand is expected to double for germanium; quadruple for tantalum; and quintuple for palladium. The scandium market could increase nine-fold, and the cobalt market by a factor of 24.19 There is going to be a scramble for these resources, for the resilience of capitalism relies increasingly on the emergence of green and digital technologies. The market will become less and less dependent on the fuels of the last two industrial revolutions, and will increasingly rely on the metals that are driving the impending transition.
The US Geological Survey and the European Commission agency in charge of raw materials have produced a map of the world’s rare metal production areas. It shows that South Africa is a major producer of platinum and rhodium; Russia of palladium; the US of beryllium; Brazil of niobium; Turkey of borates; Rwanda of tantalum; and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) of cobalt. Yet most of these metals come from Chinese mines. This is the case for antimony, germanium, indium, gallium, bismuth, tungsten, and, above all, the supreme ‘green’ metals, whose staggering electromagnetic, optical, catalytic, and chemical properties surpass all others in performance and fame: the rare-earth metals.
They form a family of seventeen elements, featuring exotic names like scandium, yttrium, lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium, neodymium, samarium, europium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, holmium, erbium, thulium, ytterbium, lutetium, and promethium. (See Appendix 3 for a map of rare-mineral-producing countries.)
Rare earths, the black market, and environmental disasters
The biggest quantity of rare earths is extracted from the bowels of Jiangxi, in the heart of tropical China, which is where our story begins.
Wang Jing knows this better than anyone. I had met the fresh-faced 24-year-old, with smiling eyes under his mop of hair, in the village of Xing Quang. He knows this strip of mountain like the back of his hand, and had little difficulty guiding me there. In fact, he spent years working at this illegal mine concealed by a copse of eucalyptus trees. He tells me how he would chip away at red-tinted rock and crush prodigious rubble aggregates alongside other miners, both men and women.
Like a human anthill, the mountain was mined twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Miners were paid a few hundred euros a month, and slept on ground plundered by picks and excavators. At this frenetic pace, hundreds of thousands of tonnes of minerals were extracted from the mountain. But four years earlier, the Chinese authorities had banned these activities, and illegal miners were slapped with heavy fines. Entire stocks of metals promised to foreign markets were seized at the port of Canton, some hundreds of kilometres south, and dozens of traffickers were thrown into prison.
Despite this, the more determined and needy miners have entrenched themselves in the folds of the mountain’s most inhospitable terrains. They prosper in secret, and are said to make payoffs to the local police. Their activities are feeding a colossal Chinese black market for minerals that, once processed, are exported worldwide.
These are the activities I have come to see. And the three illegal miners standing in our way know it. The motorcyclist threatens me again. I move away from the tent; clearly, I won’t get to see what I came for: proof of the staggering pollution created by rare-earth mining.
‘It’s poison,’ says Wang Jing. ‘The chemicals used for refining the minerals were poured straight into the ground.’ The sulphuric and hydrochloric acids would pollute the nearby stream to the point that ‘it was impossible for any plant to grow’. Because the closest housing lies far from the Yaxi mountains, there was no visible impact on residents. But elsewhere, housing was much closer, he said.
The 10,000 or so mines spread across China have played a big role in destroying the country’s environment.20 Pollution damage by the coal-mining industry is well documented. But barely reported is the fact that mining rare metals also produces pollution, and to such an extent that China has stopped counting contamination events. In 2006, some sixty companies producing indium — a rare metal used in the manufacture of certain solar-panel technologies — released tonnes of chemicals into the Xiang River in Hunan, jeopardising the meridional province’s drinking water and the health of its residents.21 In 2011, journalists reported on the damage to the ecosystems of the Ting River in the seaside province of Fujian, due to the operation of a mine rich in gallium — an up-and-coming metal for the manufacture of energy-efficient light bulbs.22 And in Ganzhou, where I landed, the local press recently reported that the toxic waste dumps created by a mining company producing tungsten — a critical metal for wind-turbine blades — had obstructed and polluted many tributaries of the Yangtze River.
A Chinese journalist reporting anonymously describes the working conditions — reminiscent of a bygone era — at the graphite mines of Shandong, in eastern China. In the processing plants rising out of dark, uprooted mounds of the Earth’s crust, ‘[M]en and women, wearing no more than basic face masks, work in areas thick with black particles and acid fumes. It’s hell.’ To complete the picture are toxic pits of chemical discharges from the plants, fields of poisoned corn, acid rain, and more. ‘Local authorities tried to police environmental offences,’ says the journalist, ‘but the pressure from automobile manufacturers was too great.’
Dirty metals for a greener world
The assertion that producing the metals we need for a cleaner world is in fact a polluting process seems incomprehensible at first. Which is understandable: most consumers have forgotten what they learned in their high-school natural sciences, physics, and chemistry classes. Let’s refresh our memories.
No need to dust off the chalkboard; a trip to the closest bakery will do. Everyone knows the ingredients of a loaf of bread: a good portion of flour, water, a bit of yeast, and a pinch of salt. It’s not that different from a rock of a similar size taken out of a mine: its ingredients comprise several minerals mixed together.
In this metaphor, the flour represents the rock that ends up on the rubble heap. The water is where it starts to get interesting: all things being equal, it represents iron — a mineral found in abundance in the Earth’s crust. Next is the yeast, making up a much smaller portion of the mix, which represents nickel — a metalloid rarer than iron. That leaves the pinch of salt: our rare metals. Their concentration in the Earth’s crust is as minute and imperceptible as the pinch of salt sprinkled into our bread dough.
But rock is composed of minerals aggregated over billions of years, and the rare metals are therefore completely incorporated in the rock — just like the salt when it is kneaded and baked into the dough. You would think that trying to extract it would be practically impossible, yet decades of research have developed the chemical processes to do just that. And the Chinese ‘sorcerer’s apprentices’ deep in the mines of Jiangxi province and elsewhere are managing to achieve this: to extract rare metals from rock.
For a process known as ‘refining’, there is nothing refined about it. It involves crushing rock, and then using a concoction of chemical reagents such as sulphuric and nitric acid. ‘It’s a long and highly repetitive process,’ explains a French specialist. ‘It takes loads of different procedures to obtain a rare-earth concentrate close to 100 per cent purity.’
That’s not all: purifying a single tonne of rare earths requires using at least 200 cubic metres of water, which then becomes saturated with acids and heavy metals.23 Will this water go through a water-treatment plant before it is released into rivers, soils, and ground water? Very rarely. The Chinese could have opted for clean mining, but chose not to. From one end of the rare metals production line to the other, virtually nothing in China is done according to the most basic ecological and health standards. So as rare metals have become ubiquitous in green and digital technologies, the exceedingly toxic sludge they produce has been contaminating water, soil, the atmosphere, and the flames of blast furnaces — representing the four elements essential to life. The result is that producing rare metals has become one of the most polluting — and secretive — industries in China. But that won’t stop me from taking a closer look.
My next stop was Hanjiang, a few dozen kilometres from the rare-earth mines I surveyed with Wang Jing. It is a hamlet located close to another of these mines. But 90 per cent of its inhabitants had fled the jumble of stone houses and their dark-tiled roofs. The residents complained that because of the rampant mining activities, ‘[n]othing we plant grows anymore. Our rice paddies have become infertile!’ Those who have refused to leave have accepted their fate. ‘What can we do?’ asked an old man, overwhelmed by the thick, cloying air. ‘There’s no point even complaining about it.’ Do the local authorities know about the pollution? ‘Of course they do! Even you would have guessed without anyone telling you!’
The heavy toll on health
This is nothing compared to what awaits me 2,000 kilometres north in Baotou, the capital of the autonomous region of Inner Mongolia, which I first visited in 2011. It’s a city well known to all rare metal hunters for the simple reason that it is the biggest rare-earth production site on the planet, far surpassing Jiangxi province. There I saw convoys of trailer trucks laden with gravel trundle down the dusty roads of the city and surrounding countryside. The hundreds of thousands of tonnes of rare earths extracted annually by the mining giant Baogang — responsible for 75 per cent of global production — contributes to the prosperity of the city and its three million or so inhabitants.
It must be said that I find Baotou quite pleasant, with its flurry of Chinese flags waving from the roofs of buildings, and swarms of bicycles zipping between the city and its industrial areas, while the troubled waters of Asia’s second-longest river, the Yellow River, caress the city’s edges. At the entrances of the city’s parks are hundreds of posters depicting a couple and their child against a green, pristine background bearing the slogan: Building a clean city for our country. It’s postcard perfect.
It is impossible, however, to get anywhere near the Baogang mines, some 100 kilometres from the city centre. Having already been marched to the police station by a pair of overzealous police officers, I was in no hurry to go back. But my Chinese fixer reckoned that by going just a few dozen kilometres west of the city, I could catch a glimpse of the industry’s secretive activities.
Past the suburbs of Baotou, below a quadruple carriageway, a lonely path led me to a cement embankment bristling with pylons, each one equipped with a security camera to watch for intruders. This is how I reached the Weikuang Dam — an artificial lake into which metallic intestines regurgitate torrents of black water from the nearby refineries. I was looking at 10 square kilometres of toxic effluent, which occasionally flows over into the Yellow River.
This is also the beating heart of the energy and digital transition.
I was left speechless during the hour I spent observing this immense, disintegrating lunar landscape. Wang Jing and I decided to get moving before the security cameras alerted the police to our presence.
A few minutes later, we arrived in Dalahai, on another side of the artificial lake. In this village of redbrick houses, where the thorium concentration in the soil is in some places thirty-six times higher than in Baotou, the thousands of villagers still living there breathe, drink, and eat the toxic discharge of the reservoir. We met one of them, Li Xinxia. With her striking features and wistful eyes, the 54-year-old woman knew this was a touchy subject, but confided in me anyway: ‘There are a lot of sick people here. Cancer, strokes, high blood pressure … almost all of us are affected. We are in a grave situation. They did some tests here, and our village was nicknamed “the cancer village”. We know the air we are breathing is toxic and that we don’t have that much longer to live.’
Is there any way out for Li Xinxia and her loved ones? The provincial authorities did offer the villagers 60,000 yuan per mu of land (around US$9,000 for 666 square metres) to relocate to high-rises built in a neighbouring town. While it was a handsome sum in a rural area where the average annual income is around US$1,300, it was not warmly greeted by the farmers. The apartments were prohibitively priced for people who could no longer live off land that has become infertile.
Rare earths have cost the community dearly. The hair of young men barely thirty years of age has suddenly turned white. Children grow up without developing any teeth. In 2010, the Chinese press reported that sixty-six Dalahai residents had died of cancer.
I return to Baotou in spring 2019. The town has expanded considerably, and its suburbs now encroach on a succession of huge rare-earth refineries. According to a few people we questioned discreetly on the site’s perimeter, the industrial group had destroyed everything before it extended its operations — starting with Dalahai, where the ‘cancer villages’ were razed and their inhabitants compensated to move. All that remains are pieces of bricks that men and women from neighbouring villages come and clear at the end of the afternoon when the heat is less oppressive.
Weikuang Dam still lies between large man-made embankments, and is fed incessantly by factory effluents. ‘The reservoir is massive. If you look at it from the roof of a building, you’ll understand. It’s so big you’d think it was the sea!’ The presence of Chinese security nearby does not stop Gao Xia from giving us her testimony. The 48-year-old villager has been rehoused with her husband in a gloomy high-rise estate overlooking the devastated landscape. Eight years after I first covered the story, the same causes seemed to be producing the same effects. By Gao Xia’s account, it is a disaster area. The water in the rivers ‘is whitish-green and sometimes red’, and the land produces corn and buckwheat with great difficulty, while cancer continues to affect local populations. After a life of living off the land, Gao Xia is condemned to eke out a living doing odd jobs here and there. She speaks of her ‘bitterness’ at being powerless against the rare-earth companies ‘that have polluted our environment’.
‘The Chinese people have sacrificed their environment to supply the entire planet with rare earths,’ Vivian Wu, a recognised Chinese expert in rare metals, tells us. ‘Ultimately, the price of developing our industry is just too high.’
How could Beijing have allowed this disaster to happen?
Playing catch-up at the risk of anarchy
To answer this question, we need to go back in time. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries were times of decline and humiliation for the Middle Kingdom. At the death of the Qianlong emperor — the ‘Chinese Louis XIV’ — in 1799, China was the global powerhouse. The empire’s borders reached the furthermost bounds of Mongolia, Tibet, and Burma. More clement temperatures and bountiful harvests led to a population boom, and at the zenith of the Qing dynasty, the political system was stable and the country’s economic production represented one-third of global gross domestic product (GDP). Middle Kingdom mania extended as far as Europe: the French writer, historian, and philosopher Voltaire waxed lyrical on the merits of Manchurian autocracy, chinoiserie was all the rage, and the English discovered their love of tea.
But soon the edifice crumbled, followed by one disaster after another: opium wars,24 unfair treaties, humiliation at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 (despite China being one of the victors of the First World War),25 the failures of the Kuomintang party,26 and the devastating effects of Maoism. At the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, China’s position in the world economy had diminished tenfold compared to the end of the eighteenth century. The country had been ravaged by civil wars, and the survivors of the bloody Cultural Revolution (which killed millions) were subjected to ghastly brainwashing.
But the Chinese are resilient; their hunger to recover their lost prestige is insatiable. After all, between the year 960 and today, China was the leading global power for close to nine centuries. The Middle Kingdom had to take back its place — at all costs.
Obsessed by the idea of erasing the failings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as quickly as possible, China has been racing at reckless speed to achieve in three decades the economic progress that took the West three centuries to accomplish. In 1976, the Communist Party, under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, opened the country to capitalism and global trade. Its policy of combining economic and environmental dumping in the form of below-market-value prices and lax environmental rules gave China a competitive advantage over Western countries, making it the factory of the world and the West’s official supplier of low-cost goods. Lastly, and most importantly, Beijing became the primary producer of all the minerals that the world needs to support its economic growth. Today, China is the leading producer of twenty-eight mineral resources that are vital to our economies, often representing over 50 per cent of global production.27 It also produces at least 15 per cent of all mineral resources, other than platinum and nickel.28 (See Appendix 4 on China’s relative share of global mining and metallurgy production in 2011.)
The downside of this spectacular success? Little attention has been given to the environmental impact of these economic choices. Industry has been left to pollute the atmospheres of major cities, to contaminate the soil with heavy metals, and to dump its mining waste in most rivers with impunity. Under the growth measures in place, anything goes. In other words, the Chinese have made a real mess of it.
The environmental cost is exorbitant, inhumane, and outrageous.29 China is the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases (producing 28 per cent of global greenhouse-gas emissions in 2015), and the alarming figures coming out of the country are multiplying. Ten per cent of its arable land is contaminated by heavy metals, and 80 per cent of its ground water is unfit for consumption. Only five of the 500 biggest cities in China meet international standards for air quality, and there are 1.6 million deaths per year due to air pollution alone.30 In the words of Chinese environmental activist Ma Jun, whom I met in Beijing: ‘This was a monumental error.’
The scourge of rare metals gone global
The pollution caused by rare metals is not limited to China. It concerns all producing countries, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, which supplies more than half the planet’s cobalt. This resource — indispensable to the lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles — is mined under conditions straight out of the Middle Ages. One hundred thousand miners equipped with spades and picks dig into the earth to find the mineral, especially in the southern region of Lualaba. Given the DRC government’s inability to regulate the country’s mining activities, the pollution of surrounding rivers and turmoil in the ecosystems are legion. Research by Congolese doctors has found that the cobalt concentration in the urine of the local communities living near the mines of Lubumbashi, in Katanga province, is up to 43 times higher than a control sample.31
We see the same in Kazakhstan, a central Asian country that produces 14 per cent of the world’s chrome — prized by the aerospace industry for the manufacture of superalloys that improve the energy performance of aircraft.32 In 2015, researchers from South Kazakhstan State University discovered that chrome mining was responsible for the colossal pollution of the Syr Darya, the longest river in Central Asia. Its water had become completely unfit for consumption by the hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, who are now even advised against using it for their crops.33
Latin America has already started to experience similar problems with lithium mining — a white metal lying below the salt flats of Bolivia, Chile, and Argentine. It is considered critical by the US, and demand is expected to soar on the back of the electric car boom that has jacked up its global production. Naturally, Argentina has its sights set on becoming the giant of lithium, and between now and 2025 the country has the capacity to produce up to 165,000 tonnes a year, or 45 per cent of global demand, provided it can get foreign investors on board.34
In May 2017, all the rare metal exploration, mining, and refining companies operating in Latin America met on the banks of Rio Plata near Buenos Aires for the Arminera international mining trade fair. Amid the excavators, skips, light towers, and other waste-water treatment equipment on display, Daniel Meilán, Argentina’s mining secretary, boasted about the ‘dozens of prospecting activities for lithium deposits in progress’ in the country, and promised a mining sector that would be responsible and compliant with international ecological standards. Before popping the champagne, and to the applause of those present, all the Argentinian industry players were invited to sign an ethics charter.
At the same time, some thirty Greenpeace activists had blocked the entrance to the trade fair, brandishing banners calling out the lies of the mining industry. ‘Everything they say is pure greenwashing,’ said one of its members, Gonzalo Strano. ‘There’s no such thing as sustainable mining. Not only does it dig out the ground by definition, it uses chemicals and massive amounts of water, which is a problem.’
The mining sector in Latin America has a sulphurous reputation. From Mexico to Chile, from Colombia to Peru, the last few years have seen growing opposition from local communities. Most emblematic of this deep distrust is the Pascua Lama gold and silver mine, operated by Canadian mining group Barrick Gold, in the north of Santiago, Chile. Extracting at this site would have involved destroying the glacier concealing the orebody — a prospect that had local residents up in arms, forcing Barrick Gold to shut down its activities in 2013.35
The Pascua Lama example inspired the entire Latin American mining sector. Large-scale lithium mining now sparks environmental activism. As with any mining activity, it requires staggering volumes of water, diminishing the resources available to local communities living on water-scarce salt flats. Already, the communities of the Hombre Muerto salt flat in Argentina blame lithium mining for contaminating their streams.36
Extracting minerals from the ground is an inherently dirty operation. The way it has been carried out so irresponsibly and unethically in the most active mining countries casts doubt on the virtuous vision of the energy and digital transition. A recent report by the Blacksmith Institute identifies the mining industry as the second-most-polluting industry in the world, behind lead-battery recycling, and ahead of the dye industry, industrial dumpsites, and tanneries.37 It has moved up one rung since the 2013 rankings, in which the much-maligned petrochemical industry doesn’t even crack the top ten. Given China’s dominant role in the global supply of rare metals, we cannot accurately assess the progress made in combating global warming without properly accounting for Beijing’s ecological performance. Which is catastrophic, to say the least.
The message of this overview of the environmental impacts of extracting rare metals from the Earth is clear: we need to be far more sceptical about how green technologies are manufactured. Before they are even brought into service, the solar panel, wind turbine, electric car, or energy-efficient light bulb bear the ‘original sin’ of its deplorable energy and environmental footprint. We should be measuring the ecological cost of the entire lifecycle of green technologies — a cost that has been precisely calculated.