E-Waste Needs Eaters; China's Battery Mine Backlash; Seaweed Mining?!
How the raw materials we need for renewable energy and digital technology are hurting people and the planet—and how we can do better.
E-Waste Needs Eaters
What do beetles, earthworms and e-waste recyclers all have in common? As I learned on a recent visit to Seattle’s Burke Museum of Natural History, they all fit the criteria for what scientists call “decomposers.” Those are beings that, per the museum, “break down dead organisms, releasing nutrients that producers and consumers can use.” OK, biologists don’t include human recyclers in this category, as far as I know, but when I read that definition I was struck by how apt it is, and what an important lesson it implies.
Ideally, the life cycle of a manufactured object should be similar to that of a natural one. In the natural world, a plant grows by taking in sunlight, water, and nutrients from the soil. That plant eventually dies, or gets eaten by an animal, which will also eventually die. Either way, decomposers will feed on their dead bodies, chomping those complex organic materials back down into more basic substances: water, carbon dioxide, nutrients and other elements. Those substances will then be taken up as food by a new generation of plants, and the circle of life rolls on.
Similarly, manufactured electronic products like toasters, cell phones and batteries are made by combining elements like metals and plastic. Those objects will be “consumed” by humans, and at some point thrown out—in effect, declared dead. The problem is that we have no naturally occurring decomposers to break down all those junked products. Bugs and microbes won’t separate out the lithium, cobalt and nickel mingled together in a cell phone battery and make those materials available for use again.
Humans were required to make that battery, and humans are required to unmake it. Today, though, most of our electronic waste never gets in to the hands of human decomposers. It just gets dumped in landfills, leaching toxic chemicals into the soil and water. To change that, we need desperately to build up the ranks of decomposers—scrappers, recyclers, waste engineers, all the folks who break our garbage back down into materials that are useful for us and the planet.
We’re constantly told that increasing productivity is the highest good. No. What we really need is to start shifting more resources into decomposing the stuff we’re already producing. Power to the detritovores!
China’s Battery Mines Face Backlash
As Chinese mining companies push into more and more countries in search of critical metals, more and more people in those countries are calling them out for human rights and environmental abuses. The BBC has identified 62 mining projects worldwide digging up lithium, cobalt, nickel or manganese—all key ingredients for EV batteries—which are wholly or partially owned by Chinese interests. Human rights groups and others have leveled at least 142 allegations of bad behavior at those projects, from unsafe working conditions to environmental damage. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, villagers have to run for shelter every few days to escape blasting at a Chinese-owned cobalt mine. In Indonesia, farmers claim they have been forced out of their homes as a Chinese joint venture mine has devastated nearby forests and rivers. In Argentina, workers outraged by staff firings blockaded a Chinese-run lithium mine with burning tires.
More such abuses are bound to come to light, and not only in Chinese-owned mines, as the battery market surges. A new report from the International Energy Agency finds that global battery manufacturing has more than tripled in the last three years. Many of those new batteries are for electric cars: worldwide EV sales zipped from 3 million in 2020 to 14 million last year.
Building all those batteries, of course, requires unprecedented quantities of critical metals, and demand is growing. In the next six years, the IEA predicts demand for lithium nickel, graphite and other minerals will increase sixfold. That means a lot more mines. All those new electric vehicles coming to the world’s roads is good news. It will be even better news if they can be built without displacing and mistreating people.
How We Can Do Better: Seaweed Mining?!
Diligent and attentive reader that you are, you undoubtedly remember my recent shpiel about phytomining—the idea of harvesting metals from plants that suck them up from the ground. Turns out the concept has an aquatic cousin: seaweed mining! ARPA-E, a US government program for funding mad scientists, has doled out $5 million to three projects looking into whether we can extract useful quantities of metals from sushi wrap, reports Moira Donovan in Hakai Magazine.
It seems some types of seaweed can absorb rare earth elements from ocean water, including neodymium, lanthanum, yttrium, and dysprosium, which are used to make wind turbines and electric vehicle motors. There are tiny amounts of these and other critical metals throughout the oceans. Scientists suspect there are higher concentrations of them in areas downstream from land deposits, so they are looking at places like the waters off Alaska’s rare earths-rich Bokan Mountain to figure out whether seaweed growing there slurps up significant quantities of the minerals.
Cool idea, but don’t get too excited just yet. No one knows how much metal seaweed can absorb, nor whether extracting those metals would make economic sense. “The chances of success are low,” the impressively honest University of Alaska researcher Schery Umanzor told Hakai. “But if we succeed, then the implications are huge.” Certainly seems like a more appealing way to extract metals from the sea than by tearing up the ocean floor.
You Should Really Watch This
Chinese mining companies aren’t the only ones infuriating locals in distant lands. This excellent documentary by W5, a Canadian news show, gives a hair-raising look at the deadly wave of protests against a Canadian copper mine that engulfed Panama last year. (I wrote about this in The Tyee, too.) Host Avery Haines gets up to some seriously ballsy reporting. The footage of cops-versus-students battles and of a psycho motorist gunning down Indigenous protesters is riveting.
Pic of the Week
I did! I was just asking about that particular article.
Why the focus on China mining crimes when Canadians are also terrible? https://amnesty.ca/human-rights-news/canadian-mining-firm-human-rights-violations-drc/