E-Waste Avalanche; Saudis Go Metal; Great Salt Lake of Lithium

Welcome to the very second issue of Power Metal, the newsletter about how the raw materials we need for renewable energy and digital technology are spawning environmental havoc, political upheaval and murder—and how we can do better.

Many thanks to the many of you who provided comments on last week’s inaugural issue or wrote to me about it! I’m finding this business of being able to write about whatever I deem interesting/important, with no editor to answer to, both liberating and unnerving. Like, how do I know if I’m doing it right? Feedback from readers like you really helps me figure it all out.

Also, extra special thanks to all of the readers who have so far signed up as founding members! This newsletter will stay free for some time, but that kind of support is great for the morale. You get my undying appreciation plus a signed copy of Power Metal, the book, when it comes out.

And now, the news.

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E-Waste Avalanche

Here’s some unsettling evidence about why the right to repair movement that I talked about last week is so important. A new UN report finds that human beings are throwing out more electronic gadgets than ever, with the global total nearly doubling from 34 billion kg in 2010 to 62 billion kg in 2022. That’s more than 68 million tons, or more precisely, one whole helluva lot. (The US, by the way, contributes about one-fifth of that total. China’s share is even higher.) Junking all that machinery releases toxic pollutants including lead and mercury into the environment, and wastes prodigious quantities of metals. Barely 22 per cent of all e-waste was properly recycled, the researchers found. “We are simply losing the battle," report author and UN scientist Kees Baldé told Reuters.

E-waste is a broad category that includes cell phones, laptops and other digital gadgets as well as things like power tools, microwaves, vacuums, even vape pens—basically, anything with either a plug or batteries. They’re complicated machines—especially the digital ones—that are typically made with many different types of metals as well plastics and other materials, which makes them a lot harder to recycle than items like glass bottles or newspapers. It’s difficult and expensive to break them down into their constituent metals and other materials, especially if you’re doing so in an environmentally safe way.

That’s why nearly one-third of the world’s e-waste winds up in developing countries where “informal” recyclers use crude, dangerous and damaging techniques to retrieve valuable metals, like burning the rubber coating off copper wires or using mercury to extract gold from electronics. Millions of tons more are simply dumped into landfills. The net result is that 12 billion kg of cobalt, lithium, neodymium and other critical metals we need for renewable energy and digital electronics are simply thrown away each year. (The machinery of renewables is itself becoming a growing garbage problem: In 2022 alone, an estimated 600,000 metric tons of ageing solar panels were tossed out, the report found.)

Better recycling infrastructure, easier repair, and less consumption would all help. Also, maybe beer yeast. Austrian researchers say they’ve figured out a way to use brewer’s yeast, a beermaking byproduct, to chemically separate out specific metals in a stream of ground-up e-waste. The process is still in the experimental stage, but you’ve gotta love any potential solution to an environmental problem that involves drinking beer.

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Saudi Arabia Wants to Become the Saudi Arabia of Critical Metals

Saudi Arabia became one of the world’s wealthiest nations thanks to its enormous oil reserves, but its leaders are savvy enough to see that fossil fuels won’t sustain them forever. That’s why they’re investing billions of dollars into some other resources needed for energy production: critical metals. “Perhaps no country on Earth, bar China, is as ambitious when it comes to the minerals sector,” writes Prashant Rao at Semafor.  “(Riyadh’s) plan to elevate the role of mining and minerals is a key part of its strategy to ensure it is not left out of the energy transition, even as it continues to pump huge quantities of oil.”

Inside its own borders, Saudi has already opened up copper and zinc mines and claims to have located huge untapped resources of rare earths, which are crucial to digital devices and electric cars. Meanwhile, it is also buying up billions of dollars worth of copper, nickel, and cobalt mining operations in Africa and elsewhere. The goal is to extract minerals abroad, and then bring them back to Saudi Arabia where the kingdom is also gearing up processing plants to produce the pure metals needed to build electric cars, batteries and other gear. The Saudis have even launched its own electric vehicle brand. The government also hosts an annual “Future Minerals Forum” in Riyadh that draws thousands of attendees and leaders of some of the world’s biggest mining companies.

There are lots of reasons this push might fail, from the lack of water needed to run mines in the desert to competition from other countries, especially China, which already dominates the world’s critical metal supply chains. Still, Riyadh has virtually unlimited amounts of cash to pour into the effort, and has officially declared its intent to make mining a “third pillar” of the economy, right there alongside petroleum and petrochemicals.

One of the worlds’ most notorious human rights abusers getting involved in one of the world’s most notoriously destructive industries. What could go wrong?

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Sucking Lithium From the Great Salt Lake

What if, instead of pulling metals out of the ground, with all the giant-hole-digging destruction that inevitably entails, we could instead pull metals out of water? I’m not talking about mining the ocean floor, I’m talking about literally mining water itself. That’s what a California startup aims to do: use cutting-edge chemistry to almost-harmlessly extract lithium from Utah’s Great Salt Lake.  

The enormous lake is fed by several rivers and streams which also carry in dissolved minerals. Those minerals have accumulated over the centuries, since the lake has no outlet, turning the lake’s water into a gumbo dense not only with salt, but other minerals as well. Prominent among them is lithium, the central ingredient in batteries for electric cars and digital gadgets. Lilac Solutions, a California start-up, plans in the coming months to start building a plant to extract that increasingly in-demand metal. “At its peak, Lilac says it will use a series of pipes to suck up 80,000 gallons of water a minute to harvest the mineral,” reports Scott Patterson in the Wall Street Journal. The company will then infuse the water with reusable ceramic “beads” that bind to the lithium and separate it out. The lithium-less brine will then be poured back into the lake, minimizing any environmental disruption.   

We already extract lots of lithium from water, especially in Chile, where mining companies pump up lithium-rich brine from underground reservoirs and evaporate the water away in enormous pools. But there are major concerns about the impact this has on local water supplies (I wrote about this issue recently in Sierra Magazine). Lilac’s technique, if it works as advertised, would use far less water, and would yield lithium much more quickly. It’s a very appealing pitch—so much so that in February Lilac convinced investors including the Bill Gates-backed Breakthrough Energy Ventures and the Japanese conglomerate Mitsubishi to hand over $145 million to support the Salt Lake project. Until the process is proved to work at scale, though, take the company’s promises with a grain of, um, salt.

You Should Really Read This

OK, granted, I’m the guy who wrote a whole book about sand, so of course I’m a sucker for other works that highlight the astonishing importance of that underappreciated commodity. But sand is just one of a half-dozen substances that we rarely think about but which are absolutely crucial to our world that Ed Conway delves into in Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization. The critical metals of copper and lithium are on the list, along with iron, salt, oil, and sand. It’s a fascinating overview of the history, science, and astonishingly complex supply chains behind these humble resources, without which we’d still be living in caves—and all of which come with serious costs.

Pic of the Week

From right to left, that’s Frogzilla, Mooncake, and the late Aramdillo, now our full-grown backyard chickens. Yes, we get eggs!