I am with Peter*, an Albanian mine worker who used to come up here with his friends before the war began in 1998. Back then, Serbs and Albanians would use the pool and nearby tennis courts together, but there are no Serb mining families here now. Two decades on, the ruination in the landscape still seems unsettling – a reminder for Peter that something valuable has been lost. “I don’t know what the hell happened here,” he says.

As we walk along a winding path he points to a cluster of blue flowers, little starbursts of colour nestled in the dead bracken. “That’s a sign there are metals underneath,” he tells me. They are a quiet reminder of the ore-rich rock that continues to disrupt life in this uneasy corner of Kosovo.

Mines like Stan Terg seem to lurk in the public imagination as remote places that are dangerous, dirty, damaging, violent and destructive. They pollute streams, corrupt politicians, degrade communities and explode indigenous artefacts.

Or they are places where bad people go – those who exploit and extract at the expense of others, human and nonhuman, and are not concerned about the cost. We seem to prefer not to think about them unless we have to.

And yet, we can’t live our modern lives without mining. We may slowly be turning our backs on fossil fuels, but what about all the other geological resources with which our lives are entangled? The mined ore in our mobile phones – those palm-size assemblages of cobalt, lithium, copper, manganese and tungsten. The lead and zinc in our car batteries, the aluminium in our bicycles, the steel in our buildings, and the copper in the hidden networks of cabling that hold our worlds together.

The problem of mining is one for all of us. But what sort of problem is it?

Mining and me

My first encounter with mining came when I worked as a television news journalist for ITN in Moscow. It was 1993, and I was travelling with two colleagues across Russia doing some filming ahead of the upcoming parliamentary elections. We had spent the day in a dilapidated helicopter tracking the Trans-Siberian Express as it wound its way through the birch forests below us. The day ended with an emergency landing in a snow field and a lift back to the town of Irkutsk in a truck.

That evening, we met a group of British men in a gloomy hotel bar. None of them spoke Russian or seemed to have travelled far from their beer glasses. It turned out they were mining engineers on their way to some remote operation further north, pulled to the heart of Siberia by whatever strange thing that mine promised them. Money? Promotion? Easy sex? Theirs wasn’t a world I wanted to be part of.

Little did I know. Two years later, overwhelmed after the war in Chechnya, undone by a conflict with a colleague and reeling from a failed relationship, I fell out of my journalistic life and landed in a small seaside town in Namibia with a baby daughter and a man I’d married but barely knew. He was a mining engineer who drove 60 kilometres inland each morning to the uranium mine that had operated there since 1976.

Suddenly everything about my life – where I lived, who I met, what I did, how I felt – was mediated by a vast, contentious, spiralled hole in an ancient desert that most people preferred not to think about. I was a white mining wife sucked into a strange world of bake sales, coffee mornings and housing officers who matched the quality of homes offered with the importance of our husbands’ jobs. We were not at the top of the pile.

On our first weekend, my husband’s throat was cut by three young men trying to break into the small, terraced house we had been allotted. He saved his own life by drawing on his training with the Royal Marines, holding his slashed neck together, keeping his pulse low and only collapsing when he made it into the back of the ambulance.

The police told us the men were from Angola, drawn to this area because of the uranium and the wealth it had created. You can’t live near a mine without being aware of the inequalities it encourages.

Since those early days in Namibia, we have moved from mine to mine around the world, making and remaking our lives in the US, South Africa, Australia, Canada, Mongolia, Serbia, then back to Canada again. With each move, I have thought more about the complexities, controversies and conflicts that surround resource extraction. Were we making our own lives at the expense of others?

Whether it’s uranium in Namibia, lead and zinc in Kosovo or copper in the Gobi desert, all geological entities become disruptive once they are mapped out and given value. Earlier in 2022, Rio Tinto – the world’s second-largest metals and mining corporation – had its exploration licences revoked by the government of Serbia after thousands of people took to the streets, demanding that the development of a lithium mine should stop on environmental grounds.

We left Belgrade in 2018, before the project became controversial, but for seven years we had been deeply involved with the complexities of mining in the Balkans. My husband led the Rio Tinto team in Serbia, and I was working on my PhD research at Stan Terg exploring the relationship between mining, conflict and peace. We would be on the wrong side of public sentiment if we lived and worked there now. That’s an uncomfortable feeling – not because it makes me think my association with mining puts me on the moral low ground, but because it’s frustrating.

No easy answers

The mining industry is changing, driven not just by international standards and external pressures but by internal forces too. I’ve met botanists, ornithologists, ecologists, archaeologists, former teachers, people who used to work for NGOs, and a host of others in the industry who are all, in their own ways, wondering how to improve things. That’s not to argue that power rests in their hands, but there is more in common between some of the people who work within mining and those who oppose it than might be imagined.

The frustration is that focusing entirely on the environmental and social harms caused by mining risks avoiding the true extent of the challenge mining presents us with, and the complex ways we are all tied up in it because of our consumer appetites.

If building a lithium mine is unacceptable in Serbia as a means to satisfy our demands, what does that mean for the lithium-rich salt flats in Chile and the Indigenous groups living there who are concerned about the impact of mining on their water sources? Or for the lithium under Mariupol in Ukraine that was attracting international attention before the war?

When Serbia’s tennis hero Novak Djokovic tweeted photos of the protests along with a declaration that we need “clean air”, I wanted to rest my forehead on my desk. He’s right, of course we need clean air. But the lithium required to achieve it must urgently come from somewhere.

The problem is in many sectors we need more mining, not less, for the transition to a zero carbon future. The World Bank has predicted that the production of graphite, lithium and cobalt will have to increase five-fold by 2050 if climate targets are to be met, and the demand for lithium-ion batteries already has analysts describing lithium as “white oil”.

In April 2022, US president Joe Biden used a cold war-era law – the 1950 Defense Production Act – to boost the production of lithium in the US, along with nickel and other minerals needed to power our electric vehicles.

Similarly, copper is integral for key large-scale decarbonisation technologies such as offshore wind projects. Working out how to source these materials has been made more urgent by the war in Ukraine, and the need to reduce dependency not only on Russian oil and gas but on its minerals and metals too.

After 26 years, I have learned that all mining operations – actual and potential – require us to pay attention to what is most difficult about our lives: how what we consume relates to the future of the planet and the lives of those we share it with. The problem of mining is not just one of how we should extract, but how we should live.

A story of optimism and attachment

The people I met at Stan Terg in 2018 told me a story about mining that was not just about dirt, degradation and pollution, but also their enduring attachment to the mine and what it promises.

Stan Terg is the oldest mine within the huge, decaying Trepča industrial complex – an ecology of mines and related infrastructure concentrated in the northern part of Kosovo. This small mine tucked away up a wooded valley, ten kilometres north-east of the town of Kosovska Mitrovica, was first developed by a British mining company in the 1920s, shortly after Serbia’s reconquest of Kosovo.

When the British travel writer Rebecca West visited here in 1937, she was enchanted by the English-style mining cottages with their unguarded front gardens and windows facing the road, reflecting the setting sun. To West, these houses expressed confidence that the mine would bring not only prosperity but also peace to this troubled region. Its Scottish general manager employed both Serbs and Albanians and was certain they would work well together. “This country,” he told West, “is getting over its past nicely.”

Nearly 90 years later, the ruins of the houses that delighted West still exist above the Stan Terg mine, but they are pitted with bullet holes. While the war between Serbia and Kosovo in the late 1990s was not (ostensibly) over natural resources, a strike by the Albanian mineworkers at Stan Terg in 1989 was part of the political upheaval that preceded the violent break-up of Yugoslavia and ultimately led to Kosovo’s declaration of independence in 2008.

Now this part of Kosovo is uneasily divided. Four Serb-dominated municipalities close to the border are still de facto ruled by Belgrade. The town of Kosovska Mitrovica, once the bustling, multicultural, industrial heart of this region, has been bisected – Serbs largely to the north of the river Ibar with their language, dinar currency and orientation towards Belgrade; Kosovan Albanians to the south.

But it is not just people who are divided here. Trepča’s smelter, flotation plant and three northernmost mines are also under Belgrade’s control. Settling the future of the complex is an explosive issue: a mining complex that once promised to bring people together is now pushing them apart – lending its geological heft to a conflict that has become intractable.

Yet the Kosovan-Albanian workers at Stan Terg are still optimistic that their mine can change things for the better. “I feel hope when I go down the mine,” one tells me. Another says it is a pleasure to work in the place that will one day make the economy better. A third describes the feeling he had when he returned to the mine after the war once the Serbs had left: “There was no happiness like it. It wasn’t just that I was going to get paid, but Kosovo was going to get stronger too.”

This is not an easy optimism to hold on to, however. It is contradicted by the ruination around us – the destroyed cinema, collapsing hotel and crumbling diving board – and by the mineworkers’ acknowledgement that life is not how they expected it would be. A tearful man worries that he made a mistake when he brought his family back here after the war. Another struggles to breathe because of the damage to his lungs. “The mine produces cripples,” he tells me.

Yet despite the destruction, pollution and disappointment, the mineworkers still insist that the lead and zinc rich rock beneath them is a “gift from God”, and that it will bring them all prosperity in the end.

Talking with these mineworkers, I realise that what is important here is the painful and profound process of creating worlds and hoping they will last; coping with the disappointment when they don’t; and remaining optimistic that a mine will deliver some sort of good life amid the evidence it never has – at least not for long.

A problem of world-making

Mining is not just a problem of extraction and the environmental degradation associated with it. It is also a problem of world-making. What sort of worlds do we want our geological resources to create for us? Who are they for? How long will they last? And who, and what, might suffer because of them?

It is tempting to think this problem is a local one – something that happens “over there” on the shores of an Arctic fjord, in the Namibian desert, in a taiga forest in the heart of Siberia, or in semi-recognised geopolitical entities with travel advisories like northern Kosovo.

Yet metals and minerals promise to make the world different for all of us. The lithium in our antidepressants. The stainless steel in the needles of our syringes that deliver vaccines, anaesthetics, Botox. The aluminium in our heat pumps, the copper in our wind turbines, the titanium in the Mars Exploration Rovers and the gold in the James Webb telescope. They all bring certain futures into view and allow us to feel confident about them: that we won’t be sad, that we won’t age, that we can achieve net-zero carbon and look after the planet – even that we can find an alternative world to escape to.

But they do so at a cost. The global hypodermic needles market is estimated to reach US$4.5 billion by 2030. Europe’s aluminium smelters are facing an energy crisis while China is ramping up its production based on an increase in coal production. The war in Ukraine is threatening to disrupt titanium supplies. Demand for copper is predicted to double to 50 million tonnes by 2035, but supply is unlikely to keep up and the net-zero transition might be delayed as a result.

According to Dan Yergin, global vice-chairman of the S&P business intelligence group, we can’t assume that copper and other metals and minerals “will just be there”. New geopolitical worlds are likely to emerge in the rush to acquire them.

Like the miners at Stan Terg, are we attached to an idea of the world that is not the same as the one we live in?

For now, the lithium and borates-rich rock under the Jadar valley in Serbia is being pulled in all directions. People interested in protecting the environment want it to stay in the ground. A local farmer understandably wants to preserve his land. Yet we need to unearth vast of amounts of lithium from somewhere if we are to swap our petrol cars for electric ones.

Meanwhile mining company shareholders expect their dividend cheques, politicians want to be re-elected, people need to feel they are listened to and have some control, and everyone, in their own way, wants to prosper. This geological body, like any other, is asking questions that are hard to answer. Whose future counts? And at what cost?

At the bottom of their world

Before leaving Stan Terg I travel down to the bottom of the mine, three-quarters of a kilometre underground. The mineworkers – all men – have told me I cannot properly understand their world unless I experience it.

I watch the wet walls of the mineshaft slip past as we descend, notice the drips of water on my helmet and a deep bass hum coming from somewhere I cannot place. I am travelling back in geological time, past rocks that are increasingly ancient as we descend. For we don’t just possess tiny pieces of Kosovo, Siberia or Alaska in the smartphones in our pockets, but elements of the deep past too – minute reminders that the world we create with them should be enduring.

I feel disoriented at the bottom of the mine, but the workers are intimate with this place. They tell me they feel good down here. I watch as they stride off along the tunnel, their boots splashing in the water.

For them, the rock around us is like a human body with veins of minerals and the capacity to expand and contract as if it is breathing. They listen to the noises it makes and understand what it says to them. After so many years, they know the sound of danger.

But this mine also holds their memories of the days when Serbs and Albanians worked together here before the war, and of the trust that emerged between them deep underground. “There are no ethnicities in a mine,” one worker tells me, “just miners.” Another says he’d like to see his old colleagues again, although he knows not everyone would agree with him.

There is optimism here, of sorts: “The problem started in Trepča and the solution will be found here too,” I am told. “If we learn how to develop Kosovo together, peace will happen.”

Yet for all their familiarity with this place, it still has the power to surprise them. Every day they find something ancient and unexpected sparkling in the light of their headlamps. There are thousands of breathtakingly beautiful crystals down here, and none of them are the same.

They are powerful objects, these crystals. I have a collection on my windowsill at home: palm-sized silver and white spines of quartz, pyrite and a host of other materials – disrupting what we think we know about mining, what we might expect to find at the bottom of a lead and zinc mine in the context of conflict, and how people might think and feel when they are down there. There is more to this world, they seem to say, than we might imagine.

*Research participant’s name changed to protect their anonymity

Bridget Storrie is a post-doctoral teaching fellow at the Institute for Global Prosperity, UCL.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Wrestling with the future of mining in a net-zero world appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The brawny marketing stunts carried a simple message: electric cars aren’t just for tree-hugging Leaf, Prius and Bolt lovers anymore. The message is timely, with global leaders (including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau) committing to carbon pollution targets of “net zero” by 2050, tough new emissions standards coming out of Europe, and a smattering of governments following Norway’s early lead on banning gas-powered-car sales as soon as 2025. For the vast majority of automakers that have cautiously dipped their toes in the EV market, the race to net zero is officially on. But environmental and human rights advocates, along with international heavyweights at the World Bank and World Economic Forum, say there’s an elephant in the showroom. The EV revolution has been racking up a whole supply chain of trouble around the globe (including a recent lawsuit) related to an onslaught of often-contentious new mines opening to meet surging battery-metal demand, not to mention the coming tide of e-waste from old batteries.

If we want to fix this before e-cars take over the roads (30% of car sales should be electric across the EU and North America by 2030, analysts forecast), the time to ensure it’s done right is now. A handful of companies are trying to get out ahead of looming environmental and social risks. So who will be the first to develop a fully ethical battery, and can car companies ensure the EV revolution is green from end to end?

Lithium mines in Chile, Open Commons

The clean-energy mining boom

The transport sector is currently the fastest-growing contributor to the climate crisis, according to the World Resources Institute (with road, rail, air and marine transport accounting for 24% of global CO2 emissions in 2016). Electrified transport – powered by low-carbon grids – could help clear deadly air pollution and cut millions of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year. In the shift from burning planet-cooking fossil fuels to generating and storing clean energy in batteries for our cars and, increasingly, our homes, one thing is certain: batteries are driving demand for more minerals in the low-carbon transition.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicts that by decade’s end the battery market will be worth $116 billion annually (not including investments in supply chains), up from $14.6 billion in 2017. Trailblazing EV manufacturer Tesla and others have warned that underinvestment in the mineral supply chain will lead to a shortage of nickel and other EV battery minerals down the road. In its 2017 report The Growing Role of Minerals and Metals for a Low Carbon Future, the World Bank forecasted that global demand for low-carbon-economy minerals such as lithium, graphite and nickel will skyrocket by 965%, 383% and 108% respectively by 2050. But two years later, as the World Bank noted that growing demand for minerals offers an “opportunity for mineral-rich developing countries to develop,” it cautioned that “significant challenges will likely emerge if the climate-driven clean energy transition is not managed responsibly and sustainably.”
But those challenges were already lurking.

Cobalt mining, Congo. Image courtesy of Amnesty International

The dark side of green minerals

Amnesty International first thrust the dark side of mining for car- and smartphone-battery minerals into the spotlight in 2016 with a damning investigation into the child labour-plagued cobalt mines of war-torn Congo (home to 60% of global cobalt reserves). Then in late 2019, the issue hit the front pages again when a landmark lawsuit was launched against Tesla and a handful of tech giants on behalf of 14 Congolese families who say their children were seriously injured or killed working in cobalt mines earlier in the year.

With cobalt dubbed the “blood diamond of batteries,” Tesla and others have been slashing their use of the controversial mineral and replacing it with nickel in a move that’s said to prolong range per change. Not that cutting and running from the Congo will help those mining in poverty, say activists, and without tough responsible mining standards in place, other EV minerals end up being called out for bad behaviour, too. The Washington Post recently reported that nickel mines in Indonesia are turning the oceans there red. The draining of water reserves for vast lithium mines in the salt plains of Latin America has been fingered for fuelling water wars, social unrest and mine strikes in Chile, Bolivia and Argentina. And a new frontier of destructive deep-sea mining for several green economy minerals has prompted the nation of Fiji, along with Greenpeace and others, to call for an immediate moratorium on the nascent practice.

At a MiningWatch conference in Ottawa in November, the human and environmental implications of this new extractive rush were front and centre. Representatives from Chile, Peru, Papua New Guinea, Congo and northern Canada took the stage one by one, concerned about the green transition being used as justification for running roughshod over their ecosystems and human rights. “The floor is dropping on standards in Peru,” said Ana Leyva Valera, executive director of CooperAcción, through a translator. With increased demand for green technology minerals, she said, “we have to make sure there are not more sacrifice zones.”

The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) has studied what it calls “green conflict minerals” (cobalt, nickel, lithium, rare earths and aluminum). The problem with green economy minerals, says IISD analyst Clare Church, is that they’re often found in countries with fragile governments, making their extraction prone to violence, conflict and human rights abuses. But like nearly every other speaker at the conference, Church goes out of her way to make one point clear: “This is not to say the transition [to a clean economy] can’t happen – it must happen.”

The question, say the IISD and others, is whether green economy minerals – and the companies that source them – can help fuel thriving, peaceful and sustainable development in communities with key mineral reserves – rather than exacerbating local unrest.

It’s a challenge Amnesty threw at carmakers at an EV summit in Norway last spring: can the auto industry develop the world’s first fully ethical battery within five years? In a statement, Amnesty’s secretary general, Kumi Naidoo, said car companies “have the resources and expertise to create energy solutions that are truly clean and fair.”

Perhaps because cars need such a large volume of minerals compared to, say, a smartphone (EV batteries weigh in at roughly 500 kilos per car), and perhaps because EV owners tend to be a fairly conscientious bunch, EVs – and the companies that make them – are now driving demand for more ethical mineral sources.

CAR COMPANIES (FINALLY) BET BIG ON EVS

A Reuters analysis found that global automakers plan to spend a combined US$300 billion on EVs over the next decade. In the last year, carmakers made some major cash commitments:

Audi is accelerating EV spending to €12 billion by 2024 and plans to offer 30 electrified (20 fully electric) vehicles by 2025.

BMW is funnelling €10 billion into new battery-cell contracts for its upcoming electric cars. It hadn’t launched a new all-electric car in seven years, but three new ones are coming online by 2021.

Hyundai just committed US$17 billion for electric and driverless cars by 2025 (less than half of that will go to EVs, so roughly US$8 billion).

Fiat Chrysler has committed to investing €9 billion to launch more than 30 electrified cars by 2022.

Volkswagen plans to spend €60 billion on rolling out 75 fully electric models and 60 hybrid vehicles over the next five years.

GM announced a US$2.3 billion joint venture with South Korea’s LG Chem to build an EV battery factory, in addition to spending US$3 billion to build an electric pickup factory in Detroit as part of its plan to add 20 new battery-electric and fuel-cell vehicles by 2023.

Ford in 2018, said it plans to spend US$11 billion by 2022 to produce 40 new electrified cars.

Nissan is pumping US$9 billion into China alone to bring more EVs to that country and plans to introduce more than 20 electric models by 2022.

Toyota earlier in 2019, said that by 2025 all models will have electrified versions. It’s spending US$2 billion on developing EVs in Indonesia alone through 2023.

Daimler in 2018, announced plans to buy €20 billion worth of battery cells for its EVs by 2030. Its entire Mercedes product range will be electrified by 2022.

Volvo will launch a new electric car every year through 2025, when it will phase out gas-only car sales entirely. Volvo told Corporate Knights it doesn’t disclose its spending on EVs.

So, which car companies are coming clean?

One route to cleaner EVs involves boosting transparency. A few leading car companies – BMW, Daimler and Renault, as well as Samsung and Apple – have started publishing supply chain data. (While Tesla doesn’t disclose cobalt suppliers, it does publish lists of its tungsten, tantalum and tin suppliers, as mandated by California law regarding officially designated conflict minerals.)

Supplier disclosure is an important first step in shedding light on shadowy supply chains – something leading sneaker and clothing brands started doing years ago in response to sweatshop scandals.

Following the unveiling of Volvo’s first fully electric car, the XC40 Recharge, this past fall, the Swedish carmaker announced that it will begin using a blockchain platform (essentially a decentralized digital ledger) to trace its cobalt. Volvo Canada’s Matt Girgis tells Corporate Knights that while Volvo has long been marketed as the safest car in the world, it’s now trying to position itself as the safest car for the planet. Making sure its minerals are “clear and safe from unethical issues,” as its blockchain partner put it, is particularly pressing now that, as of 2020, all new Volvo models will be hybrids or plug-ins, with gas-only vehicles phased out by 2025.

It’s a sign of the times that the world’s largest cobalt miner, Glencore, announced in December that it too will start using blockchain for better traceability (days before it was named as the main supplier in the Congolese lawsuit). Glencore and Fiat Chrysler are now the newest members of the Responsible Sourcing Blockchain Network, joining Volvo, VW and Ford.

Not that blockchain alone will solve human rights or environmental violations. “Blockchain is a powerful tool for tracking,” says Aimee Boulanger, executive director of the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance (IRMA), “but only if the information going in is quality” – that is, independently verified so that responsible practices are met throughout the supply chain.

There’s a hustle right now to show we can do this right, with mines that better respect communities and the environment near those mines.

–Aimee Boulanger, IRMA

Up-and-coming IRMA positions itself as the most rigorous third-party mining standard to emerge. It aims to do for mining what Forest Stewardship Council certification has done for forestry by creating a trusted standard for sustainable paper and wood products. Microsoft, Tiffany and Anglo American are already IRMA members; BMW is the first carmaker to sign up. To date, most mine certifiers have been industry-run and/or lacked teeth. Case in point: the World Bank’s recently launched Climate-Smart Mining Facility fund was slammed by a coalition of more than 50 NGOs (including Earthworks, Greenpeace and IndustriALL Global Union) for having weak performance standards and minimal oversight.

IRMA is just coming online, so don’t expect to see a car with 100% IRMA-certified battery minerals any time soon, says Boulanger. “There’s a backlog of demand for responsible mining materials,” she says. “There’s a hustle right now to show we can do this right, with mines that better respect communities and the environment near those mines.”

First world problems: bringing battery production home

In the race to ramp up EV production, a growing number of companies are looking to lock down a steady and sustainable battery supply by wresting production away from coal-heavy China – which currently dominates global battery manufacturing – and bringing production home. Literally.

Swedish battery developer Northvolt’s ambition has been to build a battery industry on European turf – from mining and refining to manufacturing and recycling. “Our mission,” it says, “is to build the greenest battery in the world with a minimal carbon footprint and the highest ambitions for recycling to enable the European transition to renewable energy.” Northvolt has teamed with Volkswagen to create the European Battery Union (EBU). BMW is also an investor.

They’re not alone. A separate 200-member European Battery Alliance (EBA) just announced that its seven EU states would contribute €3.2 billion to finance a supra-national farm-to-fork-style initiative – but for minerals – with new pilot plants to be built in each country. Estimates by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology suggest the entire battery value chain in Europe – mining, refining, cell manufacturing, battery packs and recycling – will be worth €250 billion by 2025. Northvolt predicts that by 2030 Europe will be home to at least 10 gigawatt-scale battery production plants.

Industry players say Natural Resources Canada has been aggressively laying the groundwork for a comparable boom on Canadian soil. Last summer, the feds launched a $4.5 million Impact Canada challenge aimed at accelerating made-in-Canada battery innovation. The Canadian CEO of one leading cathode supplier to EV battery producers around the world, BASF Canada’s Marcelo Lu, says that Canada has all the right ingredients to become a major battery hub: “Canada is one of the few countries that has all the elements to produce a lithium-ion battery for electric vehicles.” For instance, he says, Canadian nickel, like that found in Sudbury, is naturally rich in cobalt (Canada has 3% of known cobalt reserves).

Refining those minerals locally in provinces with low-carbon grids and shifting more mining, refining, manufacturing and recycling to Canada is on the vision board for many. But activists are quick to point out that Canadian mines aren’t beyond reproach. At the MiningWatch conference, residents and Indigenous leaders flagged water contamination and concerns about Indigenous consent in regard to various proposals in northern Quebec and around the country.

Which is why the secret to unlocking the EV revolution’s greenest potential may lie not in mine shafts but under the floorboards of aging cars.

Tesla launching closed-loop battery recycling at its Gigafactory in Nevada. Photo: Planet Labs, Inc.

Can the transition economy join the circular economy?

The International Energy Agency, which has perennially underestimated the march of green technology, estimates that annual EV sales will reach 23 to 43 million by 2030, and there should be up to 250 million electric passenger vehicles on the road, up from just five million today. As millions of EVs near retirement age, with that will come a flood of e-waste. As little as 5% of lithium-ion batteries are currently recycled, but tapping into the half tonne of metals and minerals in each and every EV battery will be key to breaking away from a linear (mine it, make it, trash it) value chain to a greener and, ideally, cheaper circular one. Refurbishing and reusing aging car batteries as energy storage packs for solar panels is one exciting innovation (after eight to 10 years of use, most batteries retain 80% of their capacity), and some are finding new life providing off-grid power to homes, businesses, streetlamps, stadiums, factories – you name it.

Recycling insiders say they’d rather see old batteries increasingly recycled into new batteries. Though, at this point, Nissan has been refurbishing its LEAF batteries rather than recycling them because it’s just plain cheaper.

A recent study in the journal Nature, by researchers at the University of Birmingham, says that car companies need to start designing batteries for easy disassembly, reuse and recycling. The EU and China already require battery makers to finance the costs of collecting, treating and recycling used batteries. Ontario is finalizing similar regulations.

So far, Tesla, Toyota and European car companies have taken an early lead on recycling. In its 2019 environmental-impact statement, Tesla announced that it will stop outsourcing recycling and will soon launch a closed-loop battery recycling process at its Gigafactory 1 in Nevada.

Keeping battery recycling close to home is one way to minimize the human rights and environmental hazards that have dogged e-waste recycling overseas. One Canadian start-up co-founded by a University of Toronto engineering grad has figured out a way to recover 80 to 100% of all lithium-ion battery components. After a $2.7 million injection from the Canadian government, Li-Cycle is now recycling batteries for several major car companies at its plant just outside Toronto. Lithion Recycling, a Quebec start-up with $3.8 million in federal backing, says it will be able to recycle 95% of a battery’s components at its Montreal pilot factory by early 2020.

However, even if recycling and reuse are mandated, academics say, there won’t be enough minerals above ground in old EVs to make fully recycled batteries for years to come.

NGOs say that we can take pressure off the planet’s scarce mineral resources if we prioritize investments in electric-powered public-transit infrastructure over pushing everyone to buy a new electric car.

Regardless, stringent standards ensuring that batteries are socially and environmentally responsible – from mining to manufacturing to end of life – need to be nailed down. The World Economic Forum’s Global Battery Alliance – a coalition of car companies, battery makers such as BASF and organizations such as the World Bank and UNICEF – is meeting in Davos in January to firm up strategies. BASF’s chair, Martin Brudermüller, issued a statement ahead of the meeting: “The time to change the trajectory of the value chain is now.”

In 20 years, will fair-certified cars with recycled-content logos be as commonplace as fair-trade coffee and Forest Stewardship Council–certified paper, scrutinized by third-party auditors and stamped with sustainable seals of approval? With so many batteries driving the clean energy transition, it’s hard to see how we can have a sustainable electric future unless it’s ethical to its core.

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