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...

#PhotoJournalism and the Tire Fire Mirror: The Vampire Class Can't Find Its Own Footprints

#PhotoJournalism and the Tire Fire Mirror:  The Vampire Class Can't Find Its Own Footprints

Poverty Porn photographers claiming to "hold up a mirror" to society fail to document the true value of reuse and maintenance is in saving the environmental expense of virgin material extraction and production. The vampires can't see themselves because they are holding the mirror facing forward, where goods go to be reused, instead of at our own extractive environmental footprint.

The perfect example? The tire fire. A fresh one appears today in the respected Council on Foreign Relations... even they use the African Tire Fire to lead their story.

Council on Foreign Relations Gets Into the Act.

(This blog is summarized on my Twitter feed in 5 tweets plus 2 postscript, copied at bottom)

ENVIRONMENTALISM cannot be scatalogical. While waste analysis is as vital to earth environmental policy as a pap smear, urine sample, or colonoscopy sample, it isn't the cure for obesity, heart disease, disease exposure, or stupid behavior... all of which are bigger predictors of death than excrement.

PHOTOJOURNALISM likes to tell us (or themselves) that they make complicated science more understandable and relatable. Photos definitely stir a human empathy (nurture) or anger/fear reaction.

For years this blog has drummed about the danger of simple looking solutions which are in fact comically fictitious if the photo is given a time lapse treatment. In today's twitter feed, I use tires as an example of photojournalist "whistle blowing" to well-meaning environmentalists - triggering collateral damage via subconscious racial profiling.

To get your attention, I'll start with the guilty western pleasure of whacking off to an African burning a pile of tires.

Long term followers will recognize this 30 year old man as Awal Muhammed of Savelugu, used here to solicit hand-wringers to view "Welcome to Sodom", the most recent "documentary" to add to the pile of lies about Agbogbloshie, the auto scrapyard in central capital of Accra, Ghana. Here's another shot of Awal, from #SashaRainbow's glam-rock-band Placebo music video of the same vein of lies about Africa's waste being not African, but recently illegally imported externalized waste from OECD evil recyclers who refused to boycott Africa's Tech Sector entrepreneurs.

I don't credit the photographer, sorry. But the photographer didn't credit, or describe, Awal Muhamed, so call it even. In any case, after one more guilty pleasure shot of Awal's accelerant dowsed tire fire performance art, I will share an actual diagram of the life cycle of automobile tires, from rubber plant production to crumb rubber or cement kiln fate in the USA or Europe.

The entry point here is Sasha Rainbow and whatshisnameWelcometoSodom and Kevin McElvaney's re-treaded claim that they are not exploiting men like Awal, that their photo-economy is necessary to HOLD UP A MIRROR to wealthy societies who, they claim, are unaware that their OECD recyclers are faking it and dumping your electronics (as evidenced by tires) on Africa.