The environmental impact of mineral mining
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Hello, I'm Sam Fenwick and you're listening to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. This week we're exploring the importance of critical minerals, seen as essential to modern life and the green transition. It's in almost every smartphone, tablet, laptop, rechargeable device and crucially most electric vehicles. But getting those minerals out of the ground comes at a cost.

Today we're exploring the impact of critical mineral mining on the planet and the people who live and work nearby. The companies are recognising that they need to up their game, they need to be responsible. Can we make mineral extraction safer, greener and more ethical? That's all coming up on this episode of Business Daily. We're doing a bit of off-roading here, aren't we? Yeah, yeah. These roads used to be used to haul the rock out.

That was mine for the Cailin. I'm in my hard hat and a high-vis jacket and I'm bouncing up a rough gravel track in a pickup truck that's taking us around the edges of a huge open pit. We're in Cornwall on England's south-west coast and at the wheel is Hanno Bice, head of mining at Imris British Lithium. So we're driving deeper into the quarry now.

Going down. How far will we go? So this is probably about 40 metres below surface level. The eventual quarry will be as deep as about 200 metres. This is a decommissioned kaolin or China clay mine. The landscape around here is dotted with them. But we now know that this site is also rich in lithium. So just walking back to the car, Hanno...

And I can see that the whole area is just sparkling. Is the mica that the lithium is attached to?

Yeah, most probably, especially in this area where we're at, most likely is. The world's demand for lithium is growing because it's a key ingredient for batteries in electric cars, vital as countries look to cut emissions and reach their climate targets. In fact, the International Energy Agency estimates lithium demand could increase by a factor of nine by 2040.

So we're literally standing all over it. It's everywhere. Yeah, yeah, pretty much. We're fortunate like that, yeah.

This site here in Cornwall is a pilot project. Its owner, Imris British Lithium, hopes that it will eventually produce enough high-grade lithium carbonate to help the UK build half a million electric vehicles every year. We don't know how deep it goes, but for now we reckon there is at least 160 million tonnes of lithium ore. 160 million tonnes!

quantify that for us? So a Land Rover weighs about two tonnes so there is about 80 million Land Rovers in weight of lithium ore so quite a lot. Next to the mine is a processing plant that will turn the lithium ore into the final product.

So what we've got here in front of us is bags and bags and bags of crushed granite and I can run it through my fingers like that and the noise that you can hear behind me is the grinding and magnetic separation process that this granite will go through when it reaches its final stage.

being lithium that can then go into a car battery. It's a costly and highly energy-intensive process, and right now almost all of it happens in China.

Alan Part is vice president for lithium projects at IMRS and he says it's crucial to change that model. What's happening is that Australia is sending product all the way to China, so over thousands and thousands of miles, a product which contains only 6% of lithium. So you're transporting 94% of a material that has no value, hence the CO2 emissions linked to that as well.

Imris British Lithium says the footprint of this site will be lower than many other lithium mines around the world because it's using the existing old clay pit rather than carving out a new one into the rolling green hills around us.

It will be brought back to nature at the end of its life. And in the meantime, some of the waste rock from here will be used to restore other nearby quarries. Alan Park says that mining can be done responsibly, but there will always be some impact on the landscape. So how can we design the project so that the social and environmental impacts are kept to

to the minimum possible. And then the question is, well, once I've designed that project, is the project worth the residual impact to produce lithium, which is virtuous because it reduces CO2 emissions down the road because we're getting petrol and diesel cars off the road. There's also a difference between, you know, am I mining for coal or am I mining for lithium? Because the residual impact that I'm willing to accept is maybe higher for a lithium than it might be if I'm going to open a coal mine.

This site has to comply with very strict UK and European laws and standards. But I'd like to know more about what's happening in other parts of the world.

So my title is Professor of Sustainable Mining and I do have days where I worry but I have a lot of days where I'm very positive about the way mining and recycling and everyone working together is coming and going. This is Professor Karen Hudson-Edwards from the Camborne School of Mines based close to the British Lithium site here in Cornwall. She comes to meet us and she's brought her own hard hat emblazoned with her native Canadian flag. How does mining change a landscape?

It depends on the type of mining you do. If you do surface mining, you can leave quite a big footprint, especially if you dig a big open pit. Also, if you have to clear land, that can lead to deforestation in some places.

If you go underground, you don't have such a surface footprint, but you're still going to be generating waste. And if you have to store that waste on the surface, you're still going to be generating quite a footprint from that. So in terms of the mining process and the waste that is created from it, how hazardous can that be? Well, not all mine waste is hazardous. There are different types. The first type is what we call the overburden. It's just normal soil and rock.

But when you start getting down to waste called tailings,

Tailings are the waste left over after you've processed the ore, you've extracted whatever you want from it. Tailings can contain nasty elements like arsenic and lead and cadmium. Often they will store them in what we call a tailing storage facility. If that's properly managed then that's a good way to store tailings. Unfortunately though some tailings are just dumped in the river or dumped at sea or have been unmanaged.

And the other thing that can happen is the tailing storage facilities can fail sometimes. There was a tailing storage facility failure in Brazil in 2015, the largest ever recorded.

and the tailings flowed from the mine 630 kilometres to the Atlantic Ocean. 630 kilometres? That's right, yes. Yeah, there's things we just don't want to have. So in another failure in Brazil, this one in 2019, the dam wall broke and the tailings flowed right through the canteen. So everyone who was having tea, unfortunately, were killed.

And then the tailings flowed into a river through a town called Brumadinho. 270 people died altogether. As a result of this, the Church of England, on behalf of its investors, got together a group consisting of the International Council on Mining and Metals and other groups, the UN Environment Programme, to do a review of tailings storage facility safety.

As a result of that, they came out with the very first international global industry standard on tailings management. And that is causing a sea change on how these are managed. Safety standards are improving, Karen says, but more needs to be done. There have been several tailings failures in mines around the world already this year, including Zambia and Indonesia.

Karen hopes investors will keep on using their power to pressure mining companies to do better. The investors in mines have always had a lot of power in many ways because they're supplying the money.

but also they have responsibility to put pressure back on the mining companies to do a good job. So they do have to raise their game, and we are seeing that. What other issues might mining cause to local communities? Well, there is the contamination we've already talked about. We have seen loss of biodiversity in mining areas.

People can be affected also if there's bad practice in the company and that they don't employ local people, they don't put wealth back into the community, they take it all away. And if there's unsafe mining practices, if they work in unsafe conditions, if they're exploited, and unfortunately we do still see this around the world in many places. That's Professor Karen Hudson-Edwards, and this is Business Daily from the BBC World Service. MUSIC

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I'm Sam Fenwick and this week we're examining the surge in demand for critical minerals. Today we're looking at the environmental impact of increased mining and the consequences for communities living by those mines.

Let's take a closer look at one critical mineral in particular. It's in a staggering amount of our everyday technology. So you, me, everyone listening to us, none of us can function for 24 hours without cobalt because it's in almost every smartphone, tablet, laptop, rechargeable device and crucially most electric vehicles. That's Siddharth Khara, an American academic based at the UK's University of Nottingham.

He's the author of Cobalt Red, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated book about cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where around three quarters of the world's supply is mined. The DRC has been dogged by violent conflict for more than 30 years. The World Bank says it's one of the five poorest nations in the world.

yet it's sitting on a huge mineral wealth. It's like an environmental apocalypse has taken place. The entire countryside has been chewed up, gouged, ripped apart. The air is acrid. Your eyes burn. You can taste it in your mouth and your throat. There's a haze of dust that's just suffocating that part of the Congo.

Massive industrial mining complexes have sprung up in the cobalt and copper-rich areas of the DRC, often owned and run by Chinese companies. But there's also what's known as artisanal mining going on too. And already we're playing games with words because it conjures quaint images of people doing artisanal activities, baking bread, making crafts. But it's actually hazardous, back-breaking, toxic work.

Siddharth has sent me a video he took on one of his visits. It shows thousands of people digging for cobalt in an open pit mine. They're crammed together. None of them have any protective equipment and they're working in the heat of the blazing sun.

Artisanal miners may work alone or in cooperatives, and it's estimated up to 20% of the country's cobalt is dug in this way. Take a family. They will find strips of rebar, maybe a pickaxe, a shovel, or just with their bare hands scrounging in the ground, surrounded by toxic grit and haze, mothers with little babies on their backs. There's hundreds of thousands of artisanal miners digging cobalt in the ground. I never saw one with protective equipment.

Siddharth claims cobalt from the DRC's many huge industrial pits ends up in the same supply chain as that dug out of the ground by artisanal miners, sometimes involving child labour. Well, it's not just being dug up and sent to the moon.

It's being dug up and sold into the formal supply chain. And how that happens is there's a well-developed system of intermediaries called négociants. They're traders. Most of them are Chinese. Many of them are Congolese, Lebanese, Russians, Indians. And they will buy a 40-kilogram sack of copper cobalt ore from a family or a child or a group of people.

and then sell that sack into the formal supply chain. It's a claim backed up by Paul. That's not his real name. He's a community worker we spoke to in Koloase, the city at the centre of the DRC's cobalt industry.

We're not naming him for his own safety. He says he's been threatened for speaking out about this in the past. Yes, of course, of course. When the cobalt leaves the semi-artisanal sites, it eventually merges with the cobalt produced by industrial companies, forming a single entity, a single mineral.

And tomorrow we have batteries, we have phones, but part of this cobalt was produced by children. Paul describes towns and cities dominated by mining and little else. Let me give you an example. The Kasulo neighborhood. It's a large neighborhood with around 100,000 residents.

And one morning, one of the residents discovers that on his property there is cobalt. That's how artisanal mining started in Kasulu. So these people start working. They mine cobalt and their children help them, either by washing the cobalt, sorting it, or putting it into bags. The sores are made further than the socks.

The Congolese government has laws against child labour, but Paul says that isn't enough. The question today is this. When the children leave the mines, where will they go? That's the problem. Paul wants to see more investment in education and skills from the Congolese government, NGOs and the companies buying the cobalt. We put some of these concerns to the Congolese and Chinese governments, but they didn't get back to us.

We also asked around a dozen of the world's biggest tech and car companies how they source their cobalt. Several haven't replied, but BMW told us that it doesn't source cobalt from the DRC for its current generation of batteries. Volkswagen says it strictly excludes cobalt from artisanal mines from its own supply chain. And Apple told us most of the cobalt used in its devices is recycled.

Let's end where we started, on England's southwest coast. You can't come to Cornwall without visiting the beaches it's famous for. A few miles away from the lithium mine is Newquay, which looks out onto the Atlantic Ocean. And it's our oceans, or more precisely the sea floor, that has become the new battleground for critical minerals.

Scientists have known for decades that parts of the Pacific Ocean are littered with so-called nodules. They're about the size of a potato and they contain several different minerals. Well, in the nodule that I'm holding, it's filled with nickel and copper and cobalt and manganese and

and an abundance of rare earth metals as well. That's Gerard Barron, CEO of the Metals Company, recently in the news after his company applied to mine the floor of the Pacific Ocean. There are literally just fields or carpets of seafloor covered in these nodules and they sit there and

unattached, like the one in my hand. And the amazing thing is we turn 100% of this nodule into saleable, usable material. So we don't generate waste or tailings that are normally associated with land-based mining. And how do you get them to the surface? How do you mine them? Well, because they lie unattached, we actually send a robot down and we actually fire a jet of water at the nodule and

which creates an inverse pressure and we lift the nodule into our robot collector. We impact only the top two to three centimeters with our robot. And then we put it into a large pipe, we call that a riser, and we use water as the transport mechanism to move it up to our production vessel four kilometers above.

So it sort of gets sucked up, a bit like a really big vacuum cleaner? Yes, you could describe it that way. Gerard Barron argues that this process creates less environmental impact than mining on land and doesn't displace or abuse people. But many environmental groups are deeply concerned. They say that it will damage ancient and fragile ecosystems, kilometres down on the sea floor, which we don't know enough about.

They also dispute his claims that it could replace mining on land, saying as demand grows for critical minerals, we could end up mining in the sea and on land to feed our insatiable need. The legal situation is complex. The metals company is hoping to bypass international rules which have so far prevented any deep sea mining from happening on a commercial scale.

Instead, it's hoping that the Trump administration will give it the go-ahead after the US president signed an executive order looking to fast-track both land and deep-sea mining, a move that was condemned by China, which said it violates international law. Look, what we're expecting is a fair hearing, and I think...

What we need is a permitting pathway. And I think what America needs is access to critical minerals. So it might just be the perfect union. That was Gerard Barron. Mining for critical minerals comes with its challenges, whether social, as we've heard in the DRC, or environmental.

Here at the lithium mine in Cornwall in the southwest of England, sustainable mining expert Karen Hudson-Edwards says the key question isn't whether mining should happen, but how it's done. The truth of the matter is at the moment, if we're going to keep going towards zero net carbon emissions around the world, we need to be mining, especially these critical minerals and metals which are necessary for our green technologies, hopefully as responsibly as possible.

But we need to increase our recycling. And I think eventually the projections are that we will get to a point where hopefully we're mining enough and starting to recycle enough that the mining need will probably go down. Perhaps in the next hundred years, I think it's hard to tell. It's all quite volatile, but I think it's in most people's projection. There are international standards which mining companies should adhere to. Should they be more robust?

Well, there's two sort of things. There are mining laws in different countries, but there are other standards, like the Global Industry Standard for Tailings Management. There are other standards. The Canadian Mining Association has developed many. There are other groups. There's one in the UK called IRMA, Institute for Responsible Mining Association.

All of these standards are not laws and they're not enforceable. They're all voluntary. But globally, I think the companies are recognizing that, again, they need to up their game. They need to be responsible and, you know, do things the proper way.

So over your career working life, you have seen a change in mining practices to make them more environmentally friendly. Absolutely. When I studied many years ago, the two options to us were to become a metal geologist or an oil geologist. Didn't even think about the environment at that time. So there's been a huge shift in thinking about the environmental impacts, thinking more holistically about the communities, the people involved.

And it's probably been in the last 10, 15 years and it's accelerating now. So hopefully that'll continue. That's all from this episode of Business Daily from the BBC World Service, presented by me, Sam Fenwick, and produced by Lexi O'Connor. Tomorrow, we'll end our series by discussing what the future holds for critical mineral mining, especially in emerging markets like Africa.

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