The Invisible Trillion · The Mining and E-Waste Question, Honestly

The Lithium Story

Lithium is the other battery material worth talking about, and its story is different from cobalt’s.

Lithium mostly comes from two places: hard rock mines in Australia, and brine pools in the “lithium triangle” — the salt flats of Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina. Australia and Chile together produce about 75% of the world’s lithium.

The Australian mines are ordinary open-pit mining operations, environmentally unremarkable by the standards of mining generally. The labor conditions are fine (Australia has strong labor laws). The environmental impact is real but contained.

The South American brine extraction is more interesting and more controversial. Lithium-rich salty water is pumped from underground aquifers into huge evaporation ponds. Over 18 months, the water evaporates, and lithium-rich concentrate remains, which is then processed into battery-grade lithium carbonate.

The issue is that those aquifers are shared with local communities — indigenous Atacameño people in Chile, among others — and with the local ecosystem, including flamingo populations that depend on the saline wetlands. How much the lithium extraction is actually drawing down the local water, and whether it is harming the ecosystem, is genuinely disputed in the scientific literature. Some studies show major impacts. Others show minimal ones. Reasonable scientists disagree.

What is not disputed is that the decisions are being made mostly by distant companies and governments, and the people who live there are not getting much of the money or much of a say. Whether or not the environmental impact turns out to be severe, the procedural injustice — local communities being asked to bear whatever the impact is, without meaningful consent or compensation — is real.

This is a different kind of problem than the cobalt one. It’s less about graphic suffering and more about fairness, consent, and scientific uncertainty. But it’s a real problem, and the “transition to clean energy” that electric vehicles and grid batteries are part of is, to a non-trivial degree, being built on top of it.

The Rare Earths Story

“Rare earth elements” are a group of 17 metals — lanthanum, neodymium, dysprosium, and so on — that are used in small quantities in lots of high-tech things, including the powerful magnets in electric motors, certain lasers, some chip manufacturing processes, and wind turbine generators.

They are not actually rare. The name is historical. What is rare is the economically viable way to extract them, because the ores they come from are almost always mixed with thorium and other mildly radioactive elements, which makes processing them messy.

About 60% of the world’s rare earth production is in China, mostly in Inner Mongolia and Sichuan. The main processing site, near Baotou, has a tailings lake that is one of the most polluted places on Earth — a black, muddy, mildly radioactive 10-square-kilometer sludge pit that local villages have had to relocate away from. You can find photographs of it. They are as bad as they sound.

This is sometimes held up as a reason to be worried about green technology, and the worry is not crazy: if wind turbines and EVs depend on neodymium magnets, and neodymium comes from Baotou, then the “clean” technology has a genuinely dirty upstream.

A few things to add to that picture, though. First, per unit of rare earth, Chinese processing has gotten much cleaner over the last 15 years under domestic pressure. Second, new rare earth production outside of China is coming online — Lynas in Australia, Mountain Pass in California — with much better environmental practices. Third, the total quantity of rare earths involved in a chip or an EV is very small — a few grams per car for the motor magnets — which means the problem scales less than you might think. Fourth, a lot of high-end applications are moving away from rare-earth magnets toward alternatives, partly for supply chain reasons, partly for cost.

Still: a lot of the magical thinking about “green tech” involves pretending that the upstream doesn’t exist. It exists. Someone lives downstream of it.

All 19 chapters of The Invisible Trillion · Library · All courses