Thousands of environmentalists in Serbia have forced a small government u-turn in a battle over mining giant Rio Tinto’s claim to the Jadar valley. 130,000 people, 2% of the Serbian population, have signed a petition against Rio Tinto’s plan to open the biggest lithium mine in Europe. The government has ditched proposed law changes that would make it easier to expropriate land.
As an essential ingredient in car batteries, lithium is a key resource of the green tech revolution. The EU wants to produce 30 million electric vehicles in the next few decades to meet its climate pledges. Demand for lithium is set to rise by 6,000% by 2050.
But Serbians have seen what lithium mining has meant in Chile, Argentina, Tibet, and elsewhere. Capitalist lithium mining is dirty work and it leaves devastation in its wake. Lithium mining is extremely water intensive. In Salar de Atacama, Chile (one of the driest places on Earth) lithium and other mining operations consume 65% of the region’s water. Crops are failing and communities are going thirsty due to the local mines.
Mine tailings are poisonous and their poisons leach into the soil and water supply. Rio Tinto expect the mine in Jadar, Serbia to produce 57 million tonnes of tailings which they plan to dump over hundreds of hectares. One of Rio Tinto’s proposed tailings sites will involve the destruction of 170 hectares of forest currently home to endangered species.
The region has recent experience of the disastrous impacts on mining waste on local communities and ecosystems. In 2014, a hundred thousand cubic metres of tailings from an antimony mine were released into a tributary of the Jadar during a flood. Hundreds of hectares of farmland are now contaminated with heavy metals. Alongside these local impacts lithium mining is extremely carbon-intensive. 15 tonnes of CO2 are emitted for every tonne of lithium extracted from hard rock.
Then a lump of lithium from Jadar will probably end up in a component of a private electric car for a middle class family in the Western Europe. Planned obsolescence, and the high cost of repair, will mean that car has an unnecessarily short life before it goes to waste and recycling.
Capitalist recycling is extremely poor. Under the current arrangement the batteries are built by competing car firms. Each firm develops its own unique design so that car manufacturers can monopolise and profit from repair and servicing. The lack of standardisation militates against effective recycling
Lithium batteries are difficult to recycle and recycling firms tend to use cheaper methods saving only a fraction of possible materials. Just as a few dud components means junking a whole car, so too high recycling costs prohibit the recovery of useful chemicals and materials from our waste. It is cheaper to rip open the Jadar valley and exhaust these rich seams of lithium as quickly as possible and leave detritus for future generations.
The unprocessed waste accumulates mostly in poorer regions of the world. Last week the EU sued Romania for failure to combat industrial pollution and its smog filled air. Romania is one of Europe’s dumping grounds. As well as mountains of legally transported waste, there are major criminal gangs operating within Romania providing a cheap way to dump Europe’s old electronic equipment, plastics, medical waste, or even toxic substances.
Romania takes a large portion of Europe’s e-waste and there is an industry of poor people with respiratory problems who pick through old gadgets for in search of rare Earth metals. The toxic air kills 29,000 a year.
The alternative to the Rio Tinto mine is not petrol cars, or to just get the lithium from elsewhere, but rather to organise economic life in a way that prioritises the elimination of waste over the maximisation of private profit.
The technology exists to extract lithium from the Earth’s crust with very limited environmental impacts. For example, a geothermal spring in Cornwall brings lithium rich waters to the surface. The lithium can be extracted in ways which produce a fraction of the CO2 emissions and leave the local water supply intact.
Mining techniques will be different when the profit motive is replaced by the aim of minimising the impacts on communities, water supplies, and biodiversity. We may see slower, more labour intensive extraction, but also more efficient use of the resources.
Waste cannot be eliminated entirely, but it can be managed carefully. Mine tailings, the solid waste from mines, are rich in chemicals that could be processed into useful products or at least inert materials that will not poison life. By carefully managing the waste at every stage of extraction and processing, it should be able to produce many useful materials that can be fed into new production processes.
It should also be possible to radically reduce the number of cars we need. In the UK, cars are parked 96% of the time. A study from the USA found that at most only 17% of all cars in America are being driven at any one time.
Car sharing schemes could reduce the number of cars we need by 89%. A 2019 parliamentary select committee found that private car ownership is incompatible with meeting the Paris climate goals.
Governments could further legislate to outlaw planned obsolescence and force companies to pay costs of repair. Standardisation could also radically reduce waste, allowing for easy and extensive repair and recycling. A highly efficient system of recycling would reduce demand on extracted lithium.
The road blockades in Belgrade and elsewhere have forced a small concession. But Rio Tinto are still committed to investing 2.4 billion euros in the project, and 40 ships bringing mining infrastructure necessary are currently sailing from Australia.
If Rio Tinto get their way, the capitalist social metabolism will transform that seam of lithium in western Serbia into a scattering of life-destroying detritus in a matter of decades. All our efforts to halt that work of reckless destruction point to the need for democratic economic planning to replace the rule of profit.
