Rare Earth Mineral / Metal Mining and the Recycling Dilemma 1: Lithium and Indium

Recently I have moved away from the longer, deliberative, but time consuming Good Point Ideas Blog and more to LinkedIn posts and "Twitter Threads".  I'm not alone in that - writers like Adam Minter have pretty much dropped blogs like ShanghaiScrap entirely.  And I'm using Facebook's Fair Trade Recycling account even less than I blog, because you know, Facebook.

But the dandelion motif of the blog remains important. "Fishing for swordfish while surrounded by perch" was a label given to me 23 years ago, which I've embraced (or sometimes substitute dolphins for swordfish and tilapia for perch when it's a international audience)... the blog is sometimes discovered years later by someone important who will never see the Tweet or Linkedin hashtag.  As bad as my blogs suffer from too many to sort, there are important reporters, researchers and policy makers out there who rely on Google or DuckDuckGo rather than the equally important Twitter search box.

The previous blog, my public submission for the General Mining Act, was important enough that I don't want to write anything to compete with it. The MassRecycle Podcast with Aaron Mintzes of Earthworks (the most important Mining Reform NGO) was also more important than much else I have to say.

But let me put two very important Mining / Recycling dilemmas on the Blog for September. Both are current.  Lithium and Indium.

I'll briefly link the Lithium debate to better written posts by experts, but Adam himself helped promote my Lithium Battery WSJ article Linkedin post and Recycling International asked me to turn it into a guest editorial. Hans Eric Melin also wrote a more astute post on the dilemma, which is as follows.

1. The carbon / global warming challenge demands more Electric Vehicles #EVs*(see footnote)

2. The EVs demand Lithium Batteries

3. There is not enough Lithium refining to manufacture the currently planned EV manufacturing.

4. Europe and USA (Biden's "inflation bill") are trying to solve the shortage by investing in RECYCLING of replaced electric vehicle batteries.

5. The batteries are not there, largely because they are being REUSED, and the investments in meeting demand with recycling reflect the same false assumptions Europe and USA generated for CRTs in the late 1990s and flip phones in the first decade of Y2k.

6. The wealthy OECD nations buying most of the #ElectricVehicles demand the two tons of car travel 150 miles between charges - and the battery is replaced because it goes less than 100 miles between charges.

7. A Secondhand Lithium Battery that will push two tons of metal a mere 75 miles between charges has WAY MORE REUSE LIFE and demand than the battery recycling investments will be able to pay.

8. Just as "Big Shred" funded reuse of flip phones and CRT monitors as "primitive" and "polluting", the new Lithium Battery Recycling industry will probably feel forced to denigrate the secondhand solar panel recycling market.

Here again is a 42 year old solar panel put to reuse by Good Point Recycling in Middlebury Vermont. It's powering a radio (symphony cuts out when my shadow passes the panel), a desk lamp, and is charging a mobile phone.  It would make zero sense for the homeowner not to replace this with a newer more efficient panel, AND it also makes no sense to ban it from reuse in Africa. The millions of solar panels that will be upgraded will drive demand for used, secondhand EV batteries. COUNT ON IT.

more...

To quote from Hans Eric Melin's Linkedin post from the big Battery Recycling Show Conference

"To understand that recycling will not help us during this decade may also spur another discussion: are we really using the resources in the most efficient way? It is almost ironic to see that the market which control the vast majority of all resources, China, also is the market where we see most initiatives to alternative solutions such as battery swapping, fast charging with smaller batteries and not least smaller vehicles.

"Still, don't let that focus again make us take the eyes from mining. Because we need more materials.

"For more information about our data, please visit https://lnkd.in/eNVrQzZ "

#recycling #batteries #electricvehicles

The Wall Street Journal article my own LinkedIn post references Biden's Inflation Reduction Act investment into Lithium battery recycling.

Battery Recycling Race Heats Up After Inflation Reduction Act

Ascend Elements raises more than $300 million, as cash pours into battery recycling companies

https://www.wsj.com/articles/battery-recycling-race-heats-up-after-inflation-reduction-act-11663115377?st

And here's the rub... we have BEEN there, we have DONE that, and the collateral damage to the poorest people will be a war on reuse.  

Status is online

Robin Ingenthron• YouBusiness Owner at American Retroworks - dba Good Point Recycling Middlebury Vermont and Brockton Massachusetts Former Deputy Division Director, Massachusetts DEP2d • Edited • 2 days ago

25 years ago, Electronics Recyclers in the USA and Europe invested in processing Cathode Ray Tube computer monitors, without considering the billions of people still buying them for reuse and refurbishment. The overinvestment in processing led to a decades-long campaign to profile the "good enough market" as "primitive recyclers".

The electric vehicle battery market is about to make the same mistake. An EV battery that won't push a ton of automobile 100 miles will certainly get replaced - more wealthy OECD buyers demand 150 miles between charges. But a battery strong enough to go even 50 miles will have a MUCH higher value in the reuse market, especially when continents like Africa get access to millions of secondhand, selectively upgraded solar panels that are about to be replaced in the USA and Europe.

I'm telling everyone right now that there is a huge demand for secondhand EV batteries and secondhand solar voltaic panels. Don't fall for the "primitive" descriptions of geeks and nerds in emerging markets, who erected 170,000 mobile phone towers in Africa based on the critical mass of users who didn't burn the flip phones we "electively upgraded". Don't put the burden of proof on the poor.

And Hans Eric Melin and I have narrowed the dilemma down to MINING.  We desperately NEED to extract more Lithium from the ground, or these recycling investments will not only fail to meet the demand, but will cannibalize the batteries needed for - wait for it - the Africa and South Asia (India and Pakistan and Bangladesh and Indonesia, etc) Secondhand Solar Panel Reuse Market.

Pakistan is currently one of the most important importers of secondhand solar panels... and in the CRT reuse markets of 20 years ago, that was driven by India's bans on import of secondhand goods under the Indira Ghandi thinking that reuse interferes with factory investment - something experts like Dr. Nabil Nasr of RIT have long dispelled.

We desperately NEED mining if we are to meet the investment in EV batteries, but at the same time, the metal and industrial mineral mining industries primarily hurt the poorest people with their extraction costs... the same reforms for the 1872 General Mining Act I'm applauding in the last August Blog are contrary to the need created by recycling investments. 

And now for that footnote on how this entire environmental policy could become an environmental disaster....

* though I will always note that if they are charged with coal plants - electricity like hydrogen is a delivery mechanism and not a source of non-carbon fuel - they don't accomplish anything.  If all India vehicles became electric overnight with a snap of your finger, the carbon would be worse tomorrow, as the mined lithium energy cost and manufacturing cost would just be added to India's coal burning electric grid carbon

As for the dilemma with Indium, it's the opposite - Europe and the USA have funded RESEARCH into recycling of indium from used electronics "blackglass", but there has been zero investment in scaling it at all.  Good Point Recycling has accumulated over 20 metric tons of indium bearing blackglass, and we can't afford to store it any longer. And no one responded to any offer from us to supply it free of charge or even pay solid waste disposal prices.  I'll focus on that in Blog 2, but preview some photos below.

Again, these are just a preview. These are generated from reuse and repair operations.

In emerging markets, they are sometimes used to replace tin roofing tiles. In OECD countries, they are usually just shredded or disposed in landfill.

The Lithium and Indium dilemmas may both be more important than plastic recycling, which seems to consume everyone on Linkedin, Facebook, and Bill Maher - because of the fetish of it being YOUR disposable, YOUR waste, YOUR fingerprint, on a bullshit statistic (Maher announced that only 14% of what's collected for recycling actually gets recycled - love ya William, but your staff slipped you a mickey there). As much as I've tried to get traction for the Fair Trade Recycling Offset projects in ocean-facing cities in Cameroon and Ghana, I've learned from Adam Minter's Bloomberg editorial that most ocean litter appears to be from ships, especially fishing industry.  Though it may be that barnacles weigh down the litter plastic and make it less likely to float than ship debris... that may come up later when ocean floor mining - another blogworthy disaster - raises plastic debris sunk to the seafloor in the next decade... as seen by The Economist in 2020 (and written as a coming disaster in this blog more than 15 years ago, search "that will go well")

Lastly, let me also navel gaze at the "Fishing for Swordfish, surrounded by perch" moniker. One reason I like it is that it can be NEGATIVE, POSITIVE, or just UNDECIDED.  Blogging takes me away from very important day-to-day work at good point - like finding the Indium Market for the black glass, or hiring for many vacancies at the company, or driving the dang trucks because the logistics logjam is affecting our company clients (I did about 12 hours driving the 2020 Freightliner box truck this week). Those actions are the perch, the tilapia, the food on the table for my clients and employees and their families. The Mining Policy blogs are intended to make the world a better place for the world, and therefore their childrens' children, but they are sometimes a gamble -- a dandelion seed that may never be seen by a dolphin or swordfish.