Since becoming president, Milei has set his sights on the country’s most valuable untapped resource: copper. With global demand for the critical mineral soaring, Milei sees a golden opportunity. So do global mining giants, like McEwen Copper Inc., owned by Canadian Rob McEwen, which possesses a major copper deposit in the northwestern province of San Juan.  

McEwen is now a central player in the copper rush currently underway in Argentina, one that stands to generate billions of dollars in annual export revenue for the country and to boost the global supply of a mineral that is essential to the energy transition. But while McEwen sees his Los Azules mine as an opportunity to showcase sustainability and best mining practice, many in Argentina see the country’s copper boom as a travesty of environmental justice and are predicting that it will end in bust.  

Opening Argentina’s copper reserves 

Vast deposits of copper are embedded in the Andes Mountains that form Argentina’s spine. It’s the same geological formation that has turned neighbouring Chile into the world’s largest copper producer and one of South America’s most stable economies. But Argentina, which has been mired in debt, financial crises and crippling inflation, has left most of its copper in the ground: exports dropped to nil in 2018 and have remained there ever since. 

Copper mining in Argentina has been hindered by political and economic instability, but also a unique piece of legislation. When it was enacted in 2010, the National Glacier Protection Law (Minimum Standards for the Preservation of Glaciers and the Periglacial Environmental Law in full) was considered a groundbreaking piece of environmental legislation. Declaring Argentina’s glaciers and periglacial zones – frozen grounds that often are saturated with subsurface ice – to be vital water reserves and therefore public assets, it made them subject to special protection. The law prioritized water security above all else: a compelling position in an increasingly drought-prone country that depends heavily on agriculture.  

In April, Argentina’s Congress voted to reform the law, downloading responsibility for glaciers and periglacial areas onto the country’s 24 provinces. Now it falls to provincial governments, rather than a federal scientific body – Argentina’s Institute for Snow, Ice and Environmental Sciences – to determine if an area is hydrologically “relevant.” Argentina’s mineral-rich provinces welcomed the change. But many Argentinians did not.  

“Now we have a crisis of representation,” says Juan Pablo Milana, a professor of geological science at the Universidad Nacional de San Juan, located in the capital city of San Juan province. “Congress is not representing the people. This law will not last for very long.”  

Save the glaciers 

Opposition to the legislative change was vocal and swift. By the end of April, two provinces – Santa Cruz and La Pampa – had filed injunctions to block its implementation, and three national organizations – Greenpeace, the Argentine Association of Environmental Lawyers, and the Environment and Natural Resources Foundation – had banded together to declare the reform unconstitutional, gathering nearly a million signatures in support. 

Milana has served as a consultant on copper mining projects in Chile and has seen many turned down in the name of glacier protection. While Chile doesn’t rely on federal legislation, Milana says the non-profits that regulate water use are rigorous in their environmental assessments.  That rigour, he insists, is necessary. “If a country allows miners to destroy glaciers, they will,” Milana says, citing Canadian-owned Centerra’s Kumtor gold mine in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan as evidence. “Miners go for minerals. They don’t care what is beside, below or above them. They have no conscience.”  

A history of harms 

The mining industry’s poor reputation in Argentina can be attributed in large part to Toronto-based Barrick Mining Corp. Multiple cyanide spills at its Veladero gold mine in San Juan led to a suspension of operations in 2016, and its Pascua-Lama mine, which straddles the Chilean border, was fined repeatedly for environmental violations before being forced to close by Chilean authorities. Barrick has also led the mining industry’s charge against the National Glacier Protection Law; in 2019, Argentina’s Supreme Court dismissed Barrick’s claim that the legislation was unconstitutional.   

But now that the law has been softened, there is little to stop the 76 copper mining projects currently registered in Argentina from entering full gear. McEwen’s Los Azules property is one of the largest and most advanced of the crop. According to a feasibility study that was completed last October, the deposit, located in a remote mountain bowl at 3,500 metres elevation, could produce some 327 million pounds of copper cathode a year, with an after-tax “net present value” – a projection of total cash flow from the mine minus taxes and royalties – estimated at US$2.9 billion. But McEwen says this mine is as much about rebranding mining in Argentina, and the world, as it is about digging for copper. The driving question, he says over the phone from his Toronto office, is “How do we make a mine that will change the public’s perception of mining?”

McEwen’s status as a mining magnate is well established. His many successful ventures in gold mining earned him a spot in the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame in 2017. Two years later, his company Goldcorp, which he founded in 1983, sold to Newmont Mining in a deal valued at US$10 billion.  

McEwen’s also known to be something of a maverick. In 2000, he turned convention on its head when he solicited public input on an underperforming gold mine he had purchased near Thunder Bay, Ontario. Rather than jealously guarding the Red Lake mine’s geological data – as is standard practice – he published it online and offered sizable cash prizes for the best exploration suggestions. More than a thousand submissions came in: input that resulted in a 10-fold increase in the mine’s yield. It was crowdsourcing before its time. 

A different kind of mine 

Now McEwen wants to roll the dice in a different way. Even though an Argentine environmental non-profit has challenged the Los Azules project in the past for contravening the National Glacier Protection Law, McEwen is confident that the operation will affect no glaciers. More, he wants the project to be a model of sustainability. Opting for heap leaching – an extraction technology that uses considerably less water and energy than conventional copper processing – McEwen says the mine will produce no tailings and be powered by exclusively renewable energy. He has engaged prominent Sudbury-born architect Jason McLennan “to put some beauty on the landscape”: renderings for the workers’ accommodation show a futuristic terraced structure three football fields long, full of hanging gardens and encased in glass. McEwen is even considering putting in a hotel “to enhance transparency of the business.”  

And then there is copper’s end use. As the best conductor of all non-precious metals, the mineral is critical to electrification: a core component of wind turbines, solar panels and EV batteries. The International Energy Agency projects a 30% increase in demand by 2040, and its chief executive officer, Fatih Birol, has warned that shortfalls in supply could slow down the energy transition.  

“The world has woken up to the fact that minerals are needed to support modern society,” McEwen says. “All those things we didn’t want in our own backyard – now someone else has built them. Now places like China have a chokehold on supply.” 

But the argument leaves some in Argentina cold. For Leandro Gómez, investments and rights program coordinator for the Environment and Natural Resources Foundation – one of the three organizations contesting the reform to the National Glacier Protection Law – the explosion of copper mining in Argentina is a sad case of self-interested politics trumping environmental rights, and an example of local communities losing out in the race to decarbonize. “The current model of the energy transition does not include the interests of the Global South,” he says from Buenos Aires.  

Meanwhile, McEwen expects construction in Los Azules to begin next year and the first copper to be in production by 2030. 

Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer.  

The post A captain of mining tries to rehabilitate the industry appeared first on Corporate Knights.

About 67 critical-minerals projects – which represent about half of all active mining proposals in Canada – are proposed, planned or under construction, according to a federal government inventory. Combined, they’ll need $72.4 billion in investment by 2034.

But as the federal government seeks capital from its allies to develop its mineral riches, some experts are advocating for a more cautious tack to working with the United States amid President Donald Trump’s continued aggressive stance toward allies and repeated musings about annexing Canada.

“From a long-term perspective . . . the best approach is to work together in development of a North American critical-minerals strategy,” says Lawrence Herman, a Toronto-based international trade lawyer and member of the Expert Group on Canada–U.S. Relations. “The challenge for Canada is the aggression of the Trump administration and its desire to control, in different ways, what happens in Canada with regard to critical minerals.”

Western countries are trying to lessen their dependence on China, which currently controls about 90% of refined production of rare-earth elements and 70% of rare-earths mining output, along with about half of the world’s reserves. Rare earths have applications in consumer electronics, advanced weapons systems and electric vehicles. China also has strong control over lithium, graphite and other niche minerals such as germanium and gallium, which have defence applications.

But a wave of new export control measures has exposed the significant vulnerabilities in Western supply chains. Amid deteriorating trade relations with the United States early last year, China instituted a special licence to export 12 rare-earth minerals and derivative products like magnets. Likewise, any product with at least 0.1% of its content coming from Chinese rare-earth metals will be restricted as of November 2026.

I think there’s a strong recognition by the U.S. that they do still need Canada for their critical minerals and mining projects.

– Photinie Koutsavlis, vice president, Mining Association of Canada

China’s dominance has also made it difficult for some Canadian mining projects to get off the ground, says Photinie Koutsavlis, vice president of economic affairs and climate change at the Mining Association of Canada. China can “flood the market with product,” depressing prices and making mine expansion or construction uneconomic.

Canada is on a deal-making spree

The G7 (Group of Seven) Critical Minerals Production Alliance, launched by Canada last summer to drum up public funding for mining and processing projects from allied countries, as well as private capital, has announced 56 investments to date. Canada and the United States have also collaborated directly on critical-minerals investments through their joint task force, established during the first Trump administration.

The United States launched its own critical-minerals buyers club, called Project Vault. The US$12-billion critical-minerals stockpile will establish price floors for various minerals and would give allied countries access to the stores in the event of shortages. To date, Washington has struck deals with more than 50 countries. Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand attended an initial meeting, but Canada has so far been noncommittal about its participation.

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Shaz Merwat, director of energy policy at RBC Thought Leadership, sees Project Vault as a strong potential market for Canadian critical minerals and notes that strategic deals under that umbrella would guarantee that Canadian minerals flow into U.S. rules of origin for batteries and electric vehicles. But in a February research paper, Merwat acknowledged that deeper minerals-supply-chain enmeshment with the United States could mean that “Canadian minerals face U.S. export licensing and defence procurement priorities that serve American industrial policy first.”

Herman raises the same concern about equity stakes the U.S. government took in October in two Canadian junior mining companies, Trilogy Metals and Lithium Americas. While both companies have their projects outside Canada, the deals could expose Canada to U.S. government action “that may not always be consistent with Canadian interests,” he says.

Despite tariffs and trade tensions, Koutsavlis says the United States remains an ally and Canada’s biggest trade partner. The mining sector also falls within the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA), and its products haven’t been hit with any tariffs. “I think there’s a strong recognition by the U.S. that they do still need Canada for their critical minerals and mining projects,” she says.

Shoring up supplies

Canada has announced it will create its own critical-minerals stockpile for defence purposes. Elizabeth Steyn, associate dean of graduate and professional programs in the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Law, says the government could sign long-term contracts with miners to create its own public stockpile, or pay companies to keep a large stock of their commodities on site. But she says it should focus primarily on stockpiling minerals that it’s vulnerable to losing access to, including those that Canada doesn’t produce.

Federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, in a February speech to the Economic Club of Canada, suggested that Canada could use a domestic stockpile of critical minerals as leverage in trade negotiations with the United States; in exchange for access to the stockpile, the United States would need to lift tariffs on Canadian goods.

Having a guaranteed government buyer would also help to de-risk projects for miners and their investors, Koutsavlis says, but stockpiling alone is not a sufficient strategy. She says the government needs to fund infrastructure to remote projects and provide more support for processing and refining. Many critical minerals are not produced at the mine but recovered as co-products through smelting and refining. But Canada’s processing capacity has declined in the past decade. Koutsavlis says a host of factors have played a role: mines with attached processing facilities reached their end of life, and declining mining output generally reduced feedstock that stand-alone smelters and refiners had access to, forcing them to seek out supply elsewhere. With China able to offer processing on the cheap, Western processors have resorted to paying for feedstock to keep their facilities operating.

Merwat says he sees the potential for Canada to create integrated “mineral corridors,” where multiple mines in a region could feed into one processing facility – such as in Sudbury’s nickel belt or the lithium deposits around Thunder Bay, Ontario – and offer economies of scale.

But that should be accompanied by price floors, similar to what the United States offers, and limits on importing feedstock from China, which would help improve the economics for Western “pure-play” refiners that are otherwise at a competitive disadvantage because, unlike larger mining and energy companies, they aren’t diversified. Otherwise, Merwat says, with public market players largely unwilling to get involved in these more risky projects, Western supply chains will remain vulnerable.

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We already know the headline facts. The wars in Ukraine and Iran are producing emissions on the order of a mid-sized industrial economy. The scramble for energy and resources helped set the stage, and the destruction of pipelines, depots and power stations has become a recurring spectacle. Analysts have tallied the greenhouse gases, the poisoned soils, the bombed substations and the forests turned to smoke. Less discussed is what this means for the energy transition itself: every tank, missile and drone is built from metals and fuels we also need for wind turbines, batteries and resilient grids.

Every tonne of copper that ends up in shrapnel rather than in wires, every kilogram of lithium that ends up in loitering munitions rather than stationary storage, slows the transition and deepens climate risk for everyone, including the supposed winners. When we choose war, we are not just adding to the climate problem; we are cannibalizing the solution.

Here we face a fork in the road. One path is to treat transition minerals as the new oil: strategic assets to be hoarded, weaponized and fought over. That path is already visible in export controls, trade extortion and a growing list of violent incidents and community protests around mines in the GlobalSouth. The other path is to treat them as a global lifeline for common security, with shared stockpiles, transparent reporting, producer countries as real partners and apolitical norm that the first call on these minerals is decarbonization, not escalation.

Modern warfare also confirms, in the harshest possible way, the old principle that shows up in all the great religious traditions: what you do unto others, you do unto yourself. In a tightly coupled Earth system, the effects of our actions propagate through food webs, supply chains and the atmosphere. When a refinery or gas pipeline explodes, the carbon doesn’t check passports on the way up. When artillery fires shell after shell into fields, the contaminants do not ask permission before entering rivers and crops. Thermobaric weapons suck oxygen from the air and generate firestorms; forests and towns burn, releasing greenhouse gases and black carbon that darken ice and accelerate melting thousands of kilometres away. High-precision missiles and drones can target power plants and transmission lines with uncanny accuracy; the replacement steel and concrete, when they eventually arrive, carry their own enormous carbon price tag. In Ukraine, war-related emissions are now estimated to exceed the emissions from all of the country’s civilian sectors.

And yet, from a certain narrow corner, war looks like a success story. Defence budgets climb; order books for missiles, shells and air defence systems fill; share prices rise. Headlines announce record revenues for the world’s largest arms makers. If your horizon is the next quarter and your constituency is shareholders, war is indeed “good for business.”

Should governments that proudly report power-sector decarbonization be allowed to keep military emissions off the books?

But that business model is parasitic on the larger economy and on the biosphere. War destroys infrastructure, scares off investment, shreds trade links and forces governments to divert money from health, education and decarbonization into replenishing stockpiles and repairing damage. It also burns through critical minerals that the low-carbon economy will need for generations.

Militarization is itself a threat to our security and that leads to some uncomfortable but necessary questions for business and finance. Should climate-aligned investors treat defence exposure as compatible with net-zero strategies, given what we now know about war’s emissions and mineral demands? Should governments that proudly report power-sector decarbonization be allowed to keep military emissions off the books? Should critical-mineral off take agreements be judged only on price and supply security, or also on whether they prioritize uses that reduce net global risk?

My father’s line about there being no winners in war was, in its way, a statement of planetary accounting. In the 21st century, with the atmosphere full and the mineral supply tight, any war anywhere threatens states and markets everywhere, and the thin atmospheric envelope that makes any kind of economy possible at all.

 Ralph Torrie is director of research at Corporate Knights.

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But even as the Trump administration shoots down emerging clean-energy technology, it has rushed to secure critical minerals – the raw materials that are crucial to renewable energy and emerging military technology – and the United States has spearheaded a number of actions meant to break China’s hold over the critical-mineral supply chain. Some experts say that the administration’s emphasis on national security is the likely point of its rush for critical minerals. But if the Trump administration stockpiles more of the minerals than the Pentagon uses, or if the mining industries don’t come together in the course of Trump’s second term, others believe that the president’s efforts could ultimately support renewable energy under a future administration.

“Currently, [critical mineral policy is] being deployed to advance a bellicose nationalism,” says Lorah Steichen, research manager at the Transition Security Project, a non-profit that investigates the U.S. and U.K. military industrial complexes as climate and economic threats. “Which is clearly in opposition to a just energy transition.”

On February 2, President Trump and the U.S. Export-Import Bank, or EXIM, announced an initiative called Project Vault – a $12-billion public–private partnership to stockpile critical minerals, meant to insulate the United States from supply shocks. It will consist of $2 billion in private capital and a $10-billion EXIM loan: companies such as Boeing, General Motors and Alphabet are expected to participate in the program and will be able to draw from the stockpile, provided they replenish the material they use.

“In theory, the project can already be used for clean energy,” says Bryan Bille, a policy and geopolitical principal at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. Even if the current administration focuses on directing much of the stockpile toward the military, Bille explains, it will still be focused on ramping up U.S. battery capacity to serve the data centre boom.

A few days after the stockpile was announced, the administration held a “Critical Minerals Ministerial” in D.C. with representatives from more than 50 countries, where Vice President JD Vance proposed a special trade zone that would use tariffs to determine price floors and allow participating countries more stable access to critical minerals. The administration recently announced that it would also use AI to set price floors in some cases, specifically when dealing with minerals like gallium – 95% of which the United States imports from China. Because the market is currently so distorted by its single supplier, Peter Cook, a climate and energy analyst at The Breakthrough Institute, explains, AI could help determine the actual cost of producing gallium, which is essential to semiconductors and other electronics.

But whether any of this lasts is dependent on critical mineral policy being codified into legislation, Cook says, pointing to the Securing America’s Critical Minerals Supply Act, which is currently in the Senate. “The key is if something like Project Vault is going to be durable beyond a single administration,” Cook says. “I think there’s certainly a possibility for [clean energy and national security stockpiling] to complement each other, instead of cannibalizing each other.”

Currently about 80% of rare-earth imports in the United States come from China, and the Trump administration has worked aggressively to break this market stranglehold through trade deals, taking equity stakes in several mining companies (which have been called into question by Democrats in the House and Senate), holding a summit to secure the AI supply chain, and even defying international law by exploring deep-sea mining in international waters.

But securing minerals alone is not enough to oust China as the world’s rare-earth and critical-minerals heavyweight. The United States still lacks the processing power to mould those minerals from raw materials, and killing the Inflation Reduction Act subsidies squashed a stream of demand, making it difficult to diversify the mineral supply chain, explains Tom Moerenhout, a professor at Columbia University who leads the Critical Materials Initiative at the Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy.

“The short-term bottleneck is getting these [processing facilities built],” Cook says. “But the real bottleneck is going to be just overall supply from a geologic perspective.” In other words, even if mines were to be up and running tomorrow, the United States might not have access to a sufficient supply of critical minerals.

To complicate matters, there isn’t an absolute overlap between the minerals needed for green energy and those needed for defence production. Antimony, for example, which the administration has made a point of seeking out, is used in military technology but not solar panels or EV batteries. And, in recent weeks, conservatives appear to have made an abrupt about-face on clean technology, likely spurred by the extreme energy demands of data centres. How this will play out in the long run remains unclear.

Experts agree that building up resilient supply chains and infrastructure could be helpful, should a future administration return the country’s focus to a clean transition. But a robust, domestic network of mining and mineral processing will require a fundamental shift in how we think about and plan for mineral extraction and extractive zones as well.

“Everybody is criticizing China for this dominance, but it was created by the West,” says Raphaël Deberdt, a postdoctoral fellow at Copenhagen Business School who studies mining anthropology. “We offshored industries that we thought were too polluting. The dominance of China in terms of processing is the result of basically 40 years of the West not wanting that done in their countries.”

Nevertheless, an effective green industrial policy, Steichen, of the Transition Security Project, explains, is not just about reducing risk in the supply chain or providing the right incentives, but also minimizing the volume of extraction. “None of that is possible as long as critical-mineral strategy is premised on national security and mineral military expansion,” she says. The data centre explosion has put the need for increased mineral recycling into sharp relief, as the chips and servers required for operation need to be replaced every few years – creating tons upon tons of e-waste, much of which is not recycled.

A 2024 report in Nature Computational Science estimated that the rapid adoption of large language models will generate 2.5 million tons of e-waste a year by 2030. “If we’re using public money, there should also be attention to labour, environmental and community standards,” Steichen says. “As well as some of the potential problems around reinforcing U.S. resource nationalism.” The United States disposes of an enormous amount of critical minerals in mine wastewater, and the Energy Department’s research arm, ARPA-E, is currently working on ways to recover usable material from that waste. But regardless of how many solar panels the United States is able to build domestically, Steichen underscores that a truly effective green industrial policy will require global climate cooperation.

This article originally appeared in Grist. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Grist is a non-profit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at grist.org.

The post How Trump’s rush to secure critical minerals for war could (eventually) help the green transition appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Currently, Nova Scotia has eight lithium exploration projects underway, which are part of the province’s strategy for increasing economic and energy security.

Along with developing critical minerals for domestic use, Nova Scotia is seeking export markets “as more companies look for reliable supplies in stable regulatory environments,” a representative of the Department of Natural Resources writes in an email.

Because of its essential role for energy grid storage and electric vehicles, lithium could see global demand skyrocket 1,500% from 2022 under a net-zero 2050 scenario and has strong potential for extraction in Nova Scotia’s southwest and east, according to a 2023 strategy document released by the department.

Natural Resources Canada estimates that battery applications such as EVs and grid storage account for 87% of global lithium demand. According to the Mining Association of Nova Scotia (MANS), lithium mining is important not just for EV batteries and energy storage but also wind turbines and solar panels, and promises more jobs and government revenues to offset health and education costs.

The International Energy Agency projects that the world will need six times more lithium by 2040 than it produced in 2024. That would mean more than 750 kilatonnes. China, Australia and Chile mine about three-quarters globally, with China refining nearly two-thirds.

Nova Scotia has long wanted to join the international market for lithium. Pegmatite, a primary geological source of lithium, was discovered at Yarmouth County’s Brazil Lake in 1960, along with lithium ore spodumene and other critical minerals such as tantalum and rubidium. For decades, Champlain Mineral Ventures Ltd., a private drilling and prospecting company based in Bridgetown, N.S., has explored the site.

John Wightman, a Champlain Mineral Ventures engineer leading the Brazil Lake Lithium Project, selected Australia’s Lithium Springs Limited to drill the site. With $8 million already spent and only a fraction of drilling done, a long road lies ahead to get a mine running, but with the eventual promise of supplying lithium to markets around the world.

Lithium-bearing spodumene concentrate extracted from the Brazil Lake mine would be shipped abroad, to supply lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide, and used by companies such as South Korea’s LG Electronics to produce batteries, Wightman says.

But to first open a lithium mine, “it takes about two-and-a-half years to get the permitting done, and then a year to two years to build out the facilities at the mine to process the ore,” Wightman says. “We’d be very optimistic to say that we could be in operation by 2030, but if the market turns around sufficiently over the next 12 months, we might be close to that.”

Despite the need for lithium to help slash global emissions over the next 25 years, this critical mineral has struggled on the market. In 2023, the price plummeted 32% due to oversupply and weak sales and hasn’t significantly recovered since, though Wightman estimated in September that lithium had rebounded 10 to 15% off August lows.

Minerals are a finite resource, and we should reduce, reuse and recycle them as much as possible.

– Sean Kirby, executive director, Mining Association of Nova Scotia

Wightman anticipates lithium’s value doubling over the next year, bringing more mineral deposits and companies back into the game. Business consulting firm Grand View Research further projects that the global lithium market will see a compound annual growth rate of 18% between 2025 and 2030, reaching US$74.8 billion.

This year saw a “major turnaround” for lithium prospects in Nova Scotia, Wightman says, thanks largely to Premier Tim Houston’s outspoken support for the sector, including at an international mining conference in Toronto in March. Houston has helped put Nova Scotia on the map for the lithium market, Wightman says, and has made it easier for companies to obtain granting approvals from the province.

Still, Champlain Mineral Ventures must raise $25 million more to “move the project to the next level,” which includes conducting mining feasibility studies, analyzing mineral content and cutting into the lithium bed using diamond. He says the Brazil Lake mine, if approved, would create 100 to 200 local jobs.

Mining’s environmental footprint

Many lithium deposits in Nova Scotia lie on farmland, including around Annapolis Royal, and “raise a bit of a red flag,” says Abbygail Lefebvre, energy coordinator for the Ecology Action Centre (EAC). Following a drought spell, record temperatures and strict water limits in the province this summer, “it’s just scary to think that now you’re going to start mining, which does require a lot of water,” she adds.

If mining moves forward at Brazil Lake and other sites, Lefebvre would want to see strict water use and discharge limits, prevention of watershed contamination, land and biodiversity protections, and climate accountability plans.

But the industry is confident that bringing lithium mining to Nova Scotia would be both environmentally and ethically sound. Wightman explains that the pegmatites of lithium “are completely environmentally benign, so there’s no chance of acid rock drainage or other threats to the environment from this type of mining.”

Mining domestically also ensures an ethical supply, MANS executive director Sean Kirby says in an email statement to Corporate Knights. “If we do not extract minerals in places like Canada, more mining will be done in countries that do not share our values, or take proper care of the environment and worker safety,” Kirby says, criticizing Chinese export markets for poor environmental and safety records. “Blocking a mining project in Canada does nothing to protect the environment – it just offshores impacts to a jurisdiction where they will likely be worse.”

But while “modern mining takes excellent care of the environment,” Kirby adds, the industry must keep doing all it can to slash emissions and consumption of energy and water. “All mining operations, for any mineral, need to meet the highest environmental standards.”

Potential for circular economy

As the industry pushes ahead, Lefebvre sees big potential for Nova Scotia to establish battery recycling infrastructure in conjunction with its lithium mining ambitions. “I would hope, too, that even if they decided to break ground, that they would still look into the economic investment and opportunity of getting into the recycling industry,” she says. “This is a circular-economy integration that we could start in the coming years – as soon as you put a facility on the ground, create a bunch of green jobs.”

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Natural Resources Canada deems lithium “infinitely recyclable,” and Kirby echoes the importance of battery recycling, which recovers up to 95% of material, including lithium, cobalt and nickel. “Minerals are a finite resource, and we should reduce, reuse and recycle them as much as possible,” he says. “Lithium batteries are just one example of where society needs to further improve recycling efforts.”

Cirba Solutions, which operates across the United States and in Trail, B.C., reports recycling 36 million pounds of lithium-ion batteries over three decades. In Quebec, Lithion Technologies says it’s slashed average greenhouse gases from battery recycling operations by 75%, using wet shredding technology to salvage 98% of minerals.

In a March 2025 report, EAC said it hopes Nova Scotia’s government will pivot toward battery recycling as the critical-mineral industry grows.

Lefebvre emphasizes that without such facilities anywhere in Atlantic Canada, Nova Scotia is well positioned to establish itself as a hub for the battery recycling industry and potentially even manufacture new batteries in province, rather than focus on exploiting raw lithium.

Evert Lindquist reports from Revelstoke, B.C. He has reported in Uganda on nature-based solutions and written for Canada’s National Observer, Climate Stories Atlantic, The Energy Mix and The Narwhal.

The post Lithium is a tough market. Nova Scotia wants in. appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Canada Nickel Company expects to reach a final investment decision early in 2026 on a sprawling, low-emissions nickel mine and refinery near Timmins, Ontario, subject to permit approval and some government financial support.

The nickel is found in ultramafic rock, which can absorb carbon dioxide through a chemical process that stores it in carbonate form. The Canada Nickel refinery would create a concentrated stream of the carbon dioxide that would be more efficiently captured by the rocks. It can also use biochar – a by-product of forestry material – to replace coke or coal and reduce emissions in the processing.

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“We’re only producing a few commodities,” says Elizabeth Holley, a professor of mining engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. “The question is: What else is in those rocks?”

The answer: a lot.

In a study published today by the journal Science, Holley and her colleagues aimed to quantify what else is in those rocks. They found that, across 70 critical elements at 54 active mines, the potential for recovery is enormous. There is enough lithium in one year of U.S. mine waste, for example, to power 10 million electric vehicles. For manganese, it’s enough for 99 million. Those figures far surpass both U.S. import levels of those elements and current demand for them.

Critical minerals are essential to the production of lithium-ion batteries, solar panels and other low- or zero-carbon technologies powering the clean energy transition. Where the United States gets those minerals has long been a politically fraught topic.

The vast majority of lithium comes from Australia, Chile and China, for example, while cobalt comes predominantly from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While securing a domestic supply of rare or critical materials has been a U.S. policy goal for decades, the push has intensified in recent years. Former president Joe Biden’s landmark climate legislation, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, included incentives for domestic critical mineral production, and this year, President Donald Trump signed an executive order invoking wartime powers that would allow more leasing and extraction on federal lands.

“Our national and economic security are now acutely threatened by our reliance upon hostile foreign powers’ mineral production,” the order read. “It is imperative for our national security that the United States take immediate action to facilitate domestic mineral production to the maximum possible extent.”

Trump also made critical minerals a cornerstone of continued support to Ukraine. Meanwhile, China recently expanded export controls on rare earth metals, underscoring the precarious nature of the global market.

Holley’s research indicates that increased domestic by-product recovery could address this instability. Even a 1% recovery rate, it found, would “substantially reduce” import reliance for most elements. Recovering 4% of lithium would completely offset current imports. “We could focus on mines that are already corporate and simply add additional circuits to their process,” Holley says. “It would be a really quick way of bringing a needed mineral into production.”

This latest research is “very valuable,” says Hamidreza Samouei, a professor of petroleum engineering at Texas A&M University who wasn’t involved in the study. He sees it as a great starting point for a multipronged approach to tackling the by-product problem and moving toward a zero-waste system. Other areas that will need attention, he says, include looking beyond discarded rock to the “huge” amounts of water that a mine uses. He also believes that the government should play a more aggressive policy and regulatory role in pushing for critical mineral recovery. “Mining is a very old-fashioned industry,” Samouei says. “Who is going to take the risk?”

The U.S. Department of Energy recently announced a by-product recovery pilot program, and the Pentagon took a $400-million stake in the operator of the country’s only rare-earth metal mine. At the same time, Congress recently repealed large chunks of the Inflation Reduction Act, which would have driven demand for critical minerals, and has slashed federal funding to the U.S. Geological Survey and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, among other research arms.

The general thrust of the Science study is “not new,” says Isabel Barton, a professor of geological engineering at the University of Arizona. “It is a very hot topic in mining these days.”

The attention is contributing to a burgeoning shift in thinking, from an intense focus on the target mineral to consideration of what else could be produced, including critical minerals. “There are some that are probably relatively simple. There are others that are heinously difficult to get to,” Barton says, and whether a mineral is recovered will ultimately come down to cost. “Mining companies are there to make a profit.”

Figuring out the most economically viable way forward is exactly the next step Holley hopes this research will inform. By-product potential varies considerably by mine, and the analysis, she says, can help pinpoint where to potentially find which minerals. For instance, the Red Dog mine in Alaska appears to have the largest germanium potential in the country, while nickel could be found at the Stillwater and East Boulder mines in Montana.

“The [research and development] funding on critical minerals has been a little bit of a scattershot,” Holley says. “Our paper allows the development of a strategy.”

This article originally appeared in Grist. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Grist is a non-profit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future.

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Neo recycles a few dozen tons of high-purity gallium a year, mostly from semiconductor chip manufacturing scrap, at a factory in Ontario. In North America, it’s the only industrial-scale producer of the metal, which is used in not only chips, but also clean energy technologies and military equipment.

China, the world’s leading producer by far, had just announced new export controls on gallium, apparently in response to reports that the United States government was considering restrictions on the sale of advanced semiconductor chips to China. All of a sudden, people wanted to talk to Neo. “We’ve spoken to almost everyone” interested in producing gallium outside of China, Tsianos told Grist.

Since Tsianos started receiving those calls, tensions over the 31st element on the periodic table – as well as the 32nd, germanium, also used in a bevy of advanced technologies – have escalated. In December, China outright banned exports of both metals to the United States following the Biden administration’s decision to further restrict U.S. chip exports.

Now, several companies operating in the United States and Canada are considering expanding production of the rare metals to help meet U.S. demand. While Canadian producers of critical minerals may get swept up in a new geopolitical tit-for-tat should Trump go through with his threat to impose tariffs, U.S. metal producers could see support from the new administration, which called for prioritizing federal funding for critical minerals projects in a day-one executive order. Beyond the United States and Canada, industry observers say China’s export ban is fuelling global interest in making critical-mineral supply chains more diverse so that no single country has a chokehold over materials vital for a high-tech, clean energy future.

“This latest round of export bans are putting a lot of wind in the sails of critical-minerals supply chain efforts, not just in the U.S. but globally,” Seaver Wang of the Breakthrough Institute, a research centre focused on technological solutions to environmental problems, told Grist.

Gallium and germanium aren’t exactly household names. But they are found in products that are indispensable to modern life – and a fossil-fuel-free society. With its impressive electrical properties, gallium is used in semiconductor chips that make their way into everything from cellphones to power converters in electric vehicles to LED lighting displays. The metal is also used in the manufacturing of rare earth magnets for electric vehicles and wind turbines, in thin film solar cells, and sometimes, in commercially popular silicon solar photovoltaic cells, where it can help increase performance and extend lifespan.

Germanium, meanwhile, is used to refract light inside fibre optic cables. In addition to helping form the backbone of the internet, the metal’s exceptional light-scattering properties make it useful for infrared lenses, semiconductor chips and high-efficiency solar cells used by satellites.

There aren’t many substitutes for these two elements. Some silicon-based semiconductors lack gallium, and specialized glasses can be substituted for germanium in certain infrared technologies. Solar cells are often doped with boron instead of gallium. But these two metals have specific properties that often make them the ideal material. When it comes to clean energy, Tsianos told Grist, there are no substitutes “within the material performance and cost trade-off spectrum” offered by gallium.

Because a little bit goes a long way, the market for both metals is small – and it’s dominated by China. In 2022, the world produced about 640 tons of low-purity gallium and a little over 200 tons of germanium, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. In recent years, China has accounted for virtually all of the world’s low-purity gallium output and more than half of refined germanium.

That’s partly because both metals are byproducts of other industries. Gallium is typically extracted from bauxite ores as they are being processed to make aluminum oxide, while zinc miners sometimes squeeze germanium out of waste produced during refining. China is a leading producer of these common metals, too – and its government has made co-extracting gallium and germanium a priority, according to Wang. “It is very strategic,” he said.

China’s dominance of the two metals’ supply chains gives it a considerable cudgel in its ongoing trade war with the United States. The United States produces no virgin gallium and only a small amount of germanium, while consuming approximately 50 tons a year of the two metals combined. A U.S. Geological Survey study published in November found that if China implemented a total moratorium on exports of both metals, it could cost the U.S. economy billions. Weeks after that study was published, China announced its ban.

The ban is so new that it’s not yet clear how U.S. companies, or the federal government, are responding. But the U.S. high-tech manufacturing sector isn’t without fallback options. North of the border, Neo’s facility in Ontario stands ready to double its production of gallium, according to Tsianos. “We have the capacity,” he told Grist. “We’re waiting for more feedstock.”

Currently, Neo’s only source of gallium is the semiconductor industry. Chip makers in Europe, North America and Asia send the company their scrap, which it processes to recover high-purity gallium that feeds back into semiconductor manufacturing. But Tsianos says Neo is piloting its technology with bauxite miners around the world to create new sources of virgin gallium. The idea, he says, is that bauxite miners would do some initial processing on-site, then send low-purity gallium to Neo for further refining in Canada. Tsianos declined to name specific bauxite firms Neo is partnering with but said the company is “making progress” toward making new resources available.

Meanwhile, in British Columbia, mining giant Teck Resources is already a leading producer of germanium outside of China. The firm’s Trail Operations refinery complex receives zinc ore from the Red Dog mine in northwest Alaska and turns it into various products, including around 20 tons of refined germanium a year, according to a U.S. Geological Survey estimate. (Teck doesn’t disclose production volumes.)

That germanium is sold primarily to customers in the United States, Teck spokesperson Dale Steeves told Grist. In wake of the export ban, Steeves said that the firm is now “examining options and market support for increasing production capacity of germanium.”

Kwasi Ampofo, the head of metals and mining at the clean energy research firm BloombergNEF, told Grist that in the near term, he would expect the United States to “try to establish new supply chain relationships” with countries that already have significant production, like Canada, to secure the gallium and germanium it needs. That may be true whether or not Trump’s proposed tariffs on Canadian imports become reality. Tsianos was bullish in spite of the tariff threat, noting in an email that Neo “remains the only industrial-scale and commercially operating Gallium facility in North America.”

“[W]e are committed to continue serving our European, American and Japanese customers in the semiconductor and renewable energy industries,” Tsianos added.

Steeves told Grist that a trade war between the United States and Canada would be “a negative for the economy of both nations, disrupting the flow of essential critical minerals and increasing costs and inefficiencies on both sides of the border.” Teck, he said,  “will continue to actively manage our sales arrangements to minimize the impact to Trail Operations.”

While Canada may be the United States’ best short-term option for these rare metals, farther down the line Ampofo expects to see the States take a  “renewed interest” in recycling – particularly of military equipment. In 2022, the Department of Defense announced it had initiated a program for recovering “optical-grade germanium” from old military equipment. At the time, the initiative was expected to recycle up to three tons of the metal each year, or roughly 10% of the nation’s annual demand. The Defense sub-agency responsible for the program didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment on the program’s status.

There’s another small source of production capacity in the United States. The global metals company Umicore recycles germanium from manufacturing scrap, fibre optic cables, solar cells and infrared optical devices at an optical materials facility in Quapaw, Oklahoma, as well as in Belgium. The company has been recycling germanium since the 1950s, a spokesperson told Grist, calling it a “core and historical activity at Umicore.” Umicore declined to disclose how much of the metal it recycles and wouldn’t say whether China’s export ban will affect this part of its business.

While recycling is able to fill some of the nation’s gallium and germanium needs, there may be a larger source of both metals lurking in sludge ponds in central Tennessee. There, in the city of Clarksville, the Netherlands-headquartered Nyrstar operates a zinc processing facility that produces wastes containing gallium and germanium. A U.S. Department of Energy spokesperson told Grist that the company has previously partnered with Ames National Laboratory’s Critical Materials Innovation Hub to develop processes for extracting gallium, which isn’t typically produced from zinc waste.

In 2023, Nyrstar announced plans to build a new US$150-million facility, co-located with its existing zinc smelter in Clarksville, capable of producing 30 tons of germanium and 40 tons of gallium a year. However, the current status of the project is uncertain, with no timetable to begin construction. A spokesperson for Nyrstar told Grist the company is “continu[ing] to work on and evaluate the business case” for the facility but declined to offer additional details.

Making a business case to produce gallium or germanium is the central challenge for firms outside of China, experts told Grist. As Tsianos of Neo put it, these metals are a “side hustle” that requires major up-front investment for a relatively small amount of extra revenue. Moreover, a bauxite or zinc miner’s ability to produce gallium or germanium typically hinges on the market conditions for the metal it is primarily focused on. That means “if aluminum prices are low or the zinc prices are low, the mine or the smelter might just not operate, even if the world is sort of screaming out for more gallium or germanium,” Wang said.

Still, there’s more economic incentive to produce these metals now than there was a few years ago. The recent geopolitical drama, Tsianos says, has caused a “bifurcation” in the price of gallium. Outside of China, the price of the metal is now “almost double” what it is within the nation’s borders.

“There’s a structural change in the market that has created a business case for outside-of-China production,” Tsianos said. “And it started because of the export control.”

This article originally appeared in Grist. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Grist is a non-profit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. 

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Fast fashion is one of the most polluting industries globally, often relying on synthetic fibres that have an ultimate origin in fossil fuels.

At the same time, the links between corporate fast-food entities and poor health and deteriorating environmental conditions is well established. Likewise, fast technology brands design for obsolescence to boost sales, requiring that more and more mineral wealth is extracted from the ground. Almost all of these activities require mining in some form along the supply chain.

Mining is also increasingly fast, with a focus on the creation of wealth for a select few and meeting global demand, not on the needs of local communities. Since the 1970s, global material footprint has quadrupled. While circular-economy strategies, such as recycling, can play a role in meeting the increasing demand for raw materials, mining cannot be completely offset by recycling alone.

The slow fashion and slow food movements are an antidote to overconsumption, promoting sustainability by emphasizing the value of quality, origin and production. New research suggests that a slow, small-scale mining movement could maintain supply, yield similar sustainability outcomes and provide a range of other benefits.

Out of this earth

The central premise of slow mining is to give control over production levels to those who work at the mine site itself. The concept recognizes that meeting global demands for raw materials requires local solutions and was evolved out of research into small-scale mining in Yukon, Canada. Additional research in Ghana has also shown how slow mining efforts led by small-scale miners can supply vital materials while also taking care of both local communities and environment.

Small-scale mining is the gradual harvest of a resource by a community (known as a rural collective economy) using more bespoke technologies (such as sluicing equipment) that miners are able to purchase – or build – and maintain themselves. Small-scale miners can also be owner-operators of their mines, where they have control over production rates to protect local communities and extend the life-of-mine for continued and secure steady income.

Small-scale mining activities are relatively common throughout the Yukon, where 108 active small- to medium-scale placer mines work to produce around 72,464 crude ounces of gold annually. By comparison, a single large-scale hard-rock gold mine can generate approximately 200,000 ounces annually in the same territory.

Yukon stands out as one of the few active small-scale mining industries in the Global North.

Artisanal and small-scale mining employ more than 40 million people in the Global South. “Slow” small-scale mining operations in Ghana have persisted despite shutdowns by a government that have favoured large, often multinational, mining enterprise under the banner of environmental protection.

Supportive structures

There are significant similarities and differences between the experiences of small-scale miners in Canada and Ghana. Notably, in both the Global North and the Global South, governance and regulation can hinder the existence of smaller mining enterprises.

Important regulatory frameworks, such as the Canadian National Instrument 43-101, are designed to protect markets, not communities or environments. This framework can make it difficult for small-scale mining enterprises to enter the sector. The dominant focus on large mining enterprises, tied to stock markets and globalization, overshadows the potential benefits of small-scale mining.

However, the Yukon government’s Placer Mining Act has helped to incubate and protect small-scale mining. Meanwhile, a floating pool of professionals who work with Yukon mining practitioners to develop place-based solutions that promote positive outcomes for mining practitioners and environment has helped the Yukon become a global leader in slow mining.

The resulting embrace of slow, small-scale mining has enabled rural communities to gradually adapt and grow with the industry. This approach enhances community resilience to boom-and-bust commodity life cycles, facilitates the development of integrated rural value chains and promotes local ownership and management, all of which can curb urban migration and create meaningful work.

Sustainable production-consumption ethos

The insights in small-scale mining from the Yukon have implications for a growing array of globally in-demand mineral and metal resources. Sustainability concepts in the mining industry have advanced toward holistic understanding, rooted in strong sustainability. Mining need not be an inherently colonial activity, and working with Indigenous people and incorporating Indigenous ways of knowing into the mine life cycle are key to overcoming sustainability challenges.

We need new mining business models anchored in local communities. Modern small-scale mining and switch-on/switch-off mining are being considered in Europe. Artisanal and small-scale mining in medium- and low-income nations produce a significant amount of critical minerals.

Who owns a mine is important, and research has shown that decentralized, locally owned mines positively correlate with high human development index outcomes and can help resist state-corporate mineral ownership.

In Canada, community-owned small-scale mining of critical minerals is economically and socially viable.

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Better alternatives

This comes at an important juncture in the expansion of raw material extraction activities that are needed to sustain the low-carbon transition but can potentially cause excessive stress to the natural environment and communities.

Slow mining illustrates how widespread global consumption is tied to the experience of mining communities, and the expectations of local stakeholders for sustainable livelihoods in sustainable environments.

Alongside slow fashion and slow food, slow mining demonstrates that the responsibility for better environmental and social outcomes lies with both a truly responsible mining industry, and a responsible culture of moderate consumption.

Cassia Johnson is a PhD candidate in earth and environmental sciences; Deborah Johnson is senior lecturer in politics and international relations; and Kathryn Moore is senior lecturer in critical and green technology metals, all at the University of Exeter.

This article first appeared in The Conversation; it has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Read the original article here. 

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