How does extracting metals affect the environment

Yes, there are added jobs and increased salaries for the people as well as increased revenue to the community, but is it worth it to sacrifice their health? To reduce all these negative impacts, people are being urged to recycle metal. In the end, it will be healthier for all. Manufacturers, too, are now more aware of the negative impact of metal extraction. To help the environment, they make use of recycled metal in their products, good examples of which are metal carports, steel cabinets, metal garage, and more.

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We all love you from your fans, keep it up….. Now, if companies continually extract metal, the land will forever … the environmental impact of metal extraction.

Aside from this, you also have to think of the transportation costs of extracted metal. However, most of these companies have cited sustainability as their primary reason for the […]. If they have the means to reuse or […]. You made a good point when you said that metal recycling is important to prevent land devastations and natural habitat loss. They have been doing excellent work on this issue for many years. How well are the electronics companies doing at keeping conflict minerals out of their supply chain?

Are you a college student interested in working with your college to be conflict mineral free? See their Conflict Free Campus Initiative , which offers tools and information to help you do this important work. Mining pollutes the water of surrounding communities through cyanide contaminated waste ore and other abandoned mine waste including toxic metals and acid, which often get released into lakes, streams and the ocean, killing fish and contaminating drinking water.

Mining for metals used in electronics is also extremely wasteful. For example, 80 tons of waste are generated from producing just one ounce of gold. Countries with very high complexity host few mining properties and exploit few resources, exhibiting that extreme levels of ESG risks can constrain mining development. This debate highlights the dual role of the mining industry as both a negative impactor and a supplier of ETMs that are crucial for climate change mitigation.

The mining industry is an intensive energy user and greenhouse gas emitter 24 and is perceived as a dirty activity that has caused adverse social and environmental impacts. The synergies and trade-offs at the source of ETM supply chains should be interrogated with greater focus and depth than has occurred to date.

The large-scale deployment of low-carbon energy technologies will continue to drive social and environmental risk. These risks can be identified by location or commodity. A global assessment of the ESG risks associated with the extraction of ETMs reveals the location of risk conditions and their combination. Identifying hot spots and locations with particular combinations of ESG risks may prompt governments, investors and other institutional actors to address acute forms of risk.

Likewise, identifying ESG risks by commodity highlights the complexities and potential constraints attached to the global supply of particular metals. Access to fresh water, for instance, is a key constraint for lithium extraction. Developing water-efficient methods in the extraction and processing of lithium could offset water scarcity issues. A high ESG score across an entire commodity, like cobalt, raises concerns about the risks of increasing its supply to meet demand.

The anticipated increase in future extractive activity comes atop a century of exponential growth in metal production. Previous mismanagement of ESG risks has created social and environmental pressures within mineral resource-rich regions This has arguably led to increased opposition to mining and resource extraction.

Future ETM production faces a dual pressure: increased demand to support the transition and increased scrutiny due to adverse impacts in locations with pre-existing ESG complexity. New projects in sound governance jurisdictions will have to confirm their ability to assess, manage and minimise ESG risks, or face opposition, which may, in turn, constrain the supply of ETMs and inhibit the transition to a low-carbon future.

This approach, used in previous work 16 , 17 , 29 , 30 , 31 , models the interface between a mining project and the geographic context in which it is located. It focuses on building an understanding of inherent or latent complexities present in the external context.

We assume that a high score in any ESG dimension drives up both the likelihood and the severity of the consequences of a detrimental event e. Records of early stages grassroots and exploration projects were excluded on the basis that their future development is too preliminary, meaning any estimation of contained resources would be unreliable.

For each mining project included in the analysis, we extracted the spatial coordinates and the most up to date resources estimates. Resources estimates represent current known metal content and discount material already extracted. Due to reporting norms, these estimates are likely to be understated.

Data are current as of May Conducting a global review at resource-scale inevitably involves some constraints on data. The seven ESG dimensions were constructed using the methodology on composite indicators from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development The first step is the review and selection of global variables that serve as proxies for different ESG aspects and that can be companied together into ESG dimensions.

Constraints for these proxies to accurately depict the ESG mining context include the availability of global data and the quality of this data resolution levels, completeness and methodological choices made by the authors of the data sets.

The mining projects were overlain with each variable and attributed location-specific values. Overall, 24 global variables from 14 different sources were applied. Of those 24 variables, 8 are national-level indexes and 16 are rasters and polygons data sets that were overlayed to the point data set on ArcGIS. The theoretical framework and data selection are summarised below, and visualised in Supplementary Fig.

Supplementary Data 1 provides source, download links and description for all variables. Correlations across ESG dimensions and across the 24 variables are presented in Supplementary Tables 3 and 4 , respectively.

The contribution of each variable to the overall risk dimensions is visualised in Supplementary Figs. Other methodological steps including data aggregation, normalisation and weighing are detailed in Supplementary Tables 5 — 7. The robustness of our methodology is tested in Supplementary Figs. These movements result in waste stocks and mining voids, which are the main cause of direct land disturbance.

In terms of land use, tailings storage facilities can cover half of the area of disturbance Waste rock dumps and voids, including open pits and underground workings, cover most of the remaining land. Mine owners are responsible for minimising the impacts of their activities on the host environment by rehabilitating disturbed areas and ensuring the effective containment or neutralisation of polluting substances.

Natural conditions in and around mine sites pose challenges to the design, construction and maintenance of waste facilities and mining voids. Reactive substances within the unearthed material and void walls are exposed to wind, rain and oxygen, which favour their reaction and the diffusion of pollution through either dust or acid drainage.

Miners have to plan for long-term containment and ensure the structural integrity of waste facilities. In extreme cases, a tailings dam failure can cause major impacts to local communities and ecosystems.

The causes of these failures are often multiple and include human and management error as well as external factors such as heavy rains and earthquakes 33 , The waste dimension takes into account both the risk of catastrophic failures and of chronic seepage and airborne pollution.

The risk indicators that were selected to build this ESG dimension included seismic risk, cyclones risk, average wind speed and maximum annual precipitation. A fifth indicator represents terrain ruggedness, which is a topographic factor that expresses the variability of elevation in an area, and adds complexity to the construction of large and stable structures.

Further explanation on the waste dimension is provided in Supplementary Note 1. Mining and mineral processing activities at mine sites usually have high fresh water requirements Fresh water here refers to high-quality water which is suitable for human consumption or would require limited treatment to make it suitable for human consumption. Inadequate mine water management involving high withdrawal, low rates of water reuse and discharge of contaminated water can heavily impact local water resources and affect surrounding ecosystems and communities.

The water dimension only quantifies the risk of not securing sufficient access to fresh water. The risk of discharge is partially covered in the waste dimension. There are other factors, such as the sensitivity of receiving environment, local regulatory frameworks and associated water quality objectives, that contribute to the risk of discharge but cannot be assessed at the selected global scale. The Baseline Water Stress indicator and the Inter-annual Variability indicator were selected for their level of completeness and their complementarity in illustrating water supply risk, as they account for two main factors contributing to securing access to fresh water: persistent low fresh water availability and significant variations in fresh water availability with time.

Extractive activities affect natural habitats both within and outside the mining lease. Mining infrastructure built to access and transport the ore creates large corridors that expand the disturbance beyond the mining area.

The risks generated by the proximity between mines and critical biodiversity preservation areas have been flagged multiple times e. For this dimension, we use three nature conservation spatial data sets, the Key Biodiversity Areas, hosted by Birdlife International 39 , the Biodiversity Hotspots map by the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund 40 and the Total Species Richness maps provided by Jenkins et al. The three data sets use different definitions of conservation priorities and complement each other.

The first two are polygon data sets, and the measure used for them is the distance from mining project points to the closest polygon. The Total Species Richness data sets are raster data sets that provide further granularity on the distribution of centres of richness for vertebrate species.

People living or working in the vicinity of a mining project are the key stakeholders and bearers of social risk. In-migration of workers and artisanal miners 42 and displacement and resettlement of populations 43 are examples of practices and social phenomena with complex consequences.

This provides an indication of the presence of directly affected communities. Some social groups are affected more than others. Indigenous peoples often experience higher levels of poverty, marginalisation and discrimination, while maintaining deep spiritual, cultural and sometimes legal ties to their land The location of a mine on indigenous land adds a degree of complexity to the social context and involves additional risks during the land access and acquisition process and throughout project expansion.

We therefore complement the communities dimension with the Indigenous Peoples Map developed by Garnett et al. Constrained access to land and management and stewardship of land are the main risks faced by the mining industry Extractive activities are bound to take place where the orebody is situated, and rearrange existing land uses.

Competition between mining and other human land uses is anticipated to increase as population growth continues Mining development and agricultural activities also tend to progressively expand, often into forestland, compromising environmental assets and threatening the livelihoods of people reliant on natural resources Mining infrastructure such as road and rail networks can enable population movements and expands the mine footprint far beyond the mining lease These three layers indicate the presence of farmland and forestland in the vicinity of the mining project, which would be then likely to compete against existing livelihoods.

A mine and its local context are situated in a wider social context, which presents varying levels of vulnerability at different scales—local, regional and national.

Vulnerability is the propensity or predisposition of an individual or group of people to suffer damage and loss, including loss of life, livelihood and property or other assets. Vulnerability to external stressors like natural or man-made disasters is, in part, a social condition 52 , and the presence of a mine constitutes the element of exposure to potential acute or chronic issues, testing societal resilience.

A variety of factors contributes to social vulnerability, namely, the susceptibility of groups and individuals to harm and their ability to respond and mitigate that harm.

Together, the three indicators and indexes combine societal, household and individual level dynamics. Health, education and poverty for the Human Development Index, income inequalities for the Gini coefficient and age dependence and family structure for the Total Dependency Ratio are identified as key factors in understanding social vulnerability Finally, the governance of a country influences both the mining project and its social and environmental context.

Robust governance frameworks support the fair redistribution of mining revenues, the protection of citizens and the environment and a clear and consistent permitting and approval process for the major project developments. Poor governance provides a permissive environment for suboptimal performance from the operator, and fuels inequalities, grievance and distrust within local populations. Poor governance contributes to a climate of vulnerability and tension, potentially leading to production disruption 54 and social unrest They include the robustness of regulations and policies, the effectiveness of public services and the degree to which rules like property rights are enforced.

They also account for social and political stability, including perceived corruption of power, and the respect of freedom and human rights.

To build the ESG risk matrix in Fig. The demand forecasts for selected metals shown in Fig. The demand for neodymium is typically forecast to be higher than for dysprosium ratios of about , but the yield for dysprosium is so much lower a ratio of about that the demand for dysprosium would be the driving factor for rare earth production in these forecast scenarios. The demand for rare earths in Fig. The value share of a given commodity in a given mine is defined as the:.

Figure 2a shows the geographic distribution of statistically significant hot spots, i. Statistically significant hot spots and cold spots have high scores and at the same time are surrounded by other projects with high scores.

Insignificant spots in black are not part of any statistically significant cluster. This was done using the statistical tool Optimized Hot Spot Analysis in the Spatial Statistics set of ArcGIS 10, which analyses each mining project within the context of its neighbouring projects. Supplementary Fig. The top 15 country list in Fig. Supplementary Table 9 shows how the top 15 list varies for different metal subgroups.

Supplementary Tables 10 and 11 provide further details on top hot spot and top cold spot countries, respectively. Further information on research design is available in the Nature Research Reporting Summary linked to this article. Download links and description of all publicly available data sets used for this study are provided in Supplementary Data 1.

Due to their proprietary nature, mining project data are only available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. Source data are provided with this paper.

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