In short · Summary by AI
This Crash Course Geology episode explains how minerals underpin modern technology and the four main mining methods used to extract them: underground, surface, in situ, and placer mining. It argues that mining causes serious environmental and human costs and that growing demand for critical minerals like lithium and cobalt makes responsible sourcing, efficient design, and e-waste recycling essential.
- Modern devices and clean energy technologies depend on dozens of minerals; the average smartphone contains about 42 different minerals.
- Mining happens through underground mining, surface mining, in situ mining (dissolving minerals with injected chemicals), and placer mining (extracting from stream sediment).
- Extraction is very wasteful: about 200 tons of ore are needed for one ton of copper and roughly 1,500 tons for one ton of cobalt.
- Mining can drastically alter landscapes, contaminate groundwater that supplies over 2 billion people, and about 15,000 miners are killed on the job every year.
- Demand for critical minerals like lithium, cobalt, and rare earth elements is rising sharply with renewable energy, and reaching net zero by 2040 would require about 40 times more lithium than in 2020.
- Supply chains are fragile and concentrated, so one weak link can disrupt the whole system, creating a catch-22 between needing minerals and limiting their damage.
- Solutions include designing more mineral-efficient products, green design and standards against planned obsolescence, and better recycling of e-waste.
- E-waste is huge and mostly poorly recycled: 62 million metric tons in 2022, with less than a quarter properly recycled, and a UN report found only 1% of rare earth demand is met by e-waste recycling.
- 0:00Minerals Power Our Lives
- 0:33Minerals in Modern Technology
- 1:10Four Methods of Mining
- 2:18Huge Amounts of Ore Needed
- 2:53Environmental and Human Costs
- 3:30Critical Minerals and Demand
- 5:17Responsible Mining Challenges
- 5:54Efficient Design and Green Tech
- 7:15E-Waste and Urban Mining
- 9:06Circular Economy and Geologists
Minerals Power Our Lives
0:00No matter where you are, what device you're watching this on, it's because of minerals. Subterranean specs from all over the world power our lives in invisible ways. They're in our buildings, our tech, our food packaging, and our toothpaste. Without them, there'd be no solar batteries, no wind turbines, no electric cars.
0:14Today, our modern society depends on a wider variety of minerals at a larger scale than ever before. But, what does that mean for our future? Hi, I'm Sage and this is Crash Course Geology.
Minerals in Modern Technology
0:33Earlier in this series, we learned the basics of minerals, solid crystals with specific chemical compositions formed by geological processes. We humans have been innovating with them for thousands of years, all the way back to painting on cave walls with hematite and later making tools out of bronze and iron.
0:47And today, minerals are behind nearly every gadget and gizmo in our tech-fueled world. Take your phone, for example. There are about 42 different minerals in the average smartphone alone. Quartz sand and sphalerite are used to make its screen, and bauxite helps it light up. There's silicon from quartz in its circuits, wolframite and bastnaesite to make it vibrate, lithium in its batteries sourced from spodumene.
Four Methods of Mining
1:10I could go on. But, how do we get all those minerals that our societies are literally built on? Well, it's complicated. Mining, or the extraction of minerals from the earth, can be done in four main ways. Some mining happens underground through tunnels and shafts dug deep in the earth. Other times, minerals are extracted through surface mining, where open pits or strips are carved into the land.
1:35Both these methods are used to dig up the copper found in your smartphone circuitry. There's also in situ mining, where a chemical solution gets injected into the ground to dissolve particular minerals so they can be pumped to the surface. And lastly, there's placer mining, which takes minerals from the sediment of stream beds.
1:52It's a common method for extracting gold, which your smartphone has tiny amounts of in its circuits. And extraction is just the first step of mining. To get usable, purified minerals, what's taken from the earth has to be processed and refined. It takes a huge amount of moving and processing rocks and dirt to get even a small amount of what we're after.
2:10For just one ton of copper, we have to extract and process up to 200 tons of ore, the solid material that it's found in. To get just one ton of cobalt to make batteries, we have to dig up roughly 1,500 tons of ore. Real Neil and a haystack situation. All that digging, processing, and refining just to get this.
Huge Amounts of Ore Needed
2:32Now, here's the not-so-fun part. While mining provides us with the materials for our modern lives, it also wreaks havoc on the environment. Both underground and surface mining drastically change the landscape and can release toxic contaminants [music] if not done carefully. In-situ mining disturbs the surface of the land much less than carving into it, but it still risks contaminating the ground water, which supplies drinking water for over 2 billion people.
Environmental and Human Costs
2:58And even placer mining risks disturbing ecosystems and polluting the soil and water. Not to mention, processing and refining can rev up erosion and contaminate the air, soil, and waterways. All these effects can threaten the homes and health of people living nearby, including the workers actually doing the mining.
3:15About 15,000 miners are killed on the job every year. And there are even more complications to consider. Today's technologies are relying on a wider variety of minerals in larger amounts than ever before in human history. That's especially true as we ramp up renewable energy technologies that'll help us break up with fossil fuels and slow down climate change.
Critical Minerals and Demand
3:39But as demand for these technologies grows, so does the demand for more minerals that build and power them, like copper, nickel, chromium, zinc, and cobalt. These are examples of critical minerals, resources are in high demand but are hard to get. Some of these minerals are rarely found on Earth. Others are hard to get because of tricky political dynamics between countries that have them and countries that want them.
4:03One country's list of critical minerals might be different from another's depending on the resources they've got and the ones they need to import. Still other minerals might be called critical because they're just so dang hard to extract from the ground, like rare earth elements, metals in the middle of the periodic table.
4:22Take the critical mineral lithium. For decades, it's been a mood stabilizing ingredient in some antidepressants. We also use it in the batteries that power electric cars and store solar and wind energy. All of which we're using more and more all the time, which is great. The faster we break up with fossil fuels, the better.
4:39But also, the more we need a steady supply of lithium. If we were to achieve net zero global carbon emissions by 2040, lithium demand would be 40 times higher than it was in 2020. That's a lot of lithium. Even though lithium isn't exactly rare worldwide, most of it comes from just a few countries and it has to travel through multiple links in a global supply chain before it's actually in use.
5:00Like, it's common for lithium mined in Australia to be refined in China before it's manufactured in a battery in California. Even one weak link in that supply chain can disrupt the whole thing. The situation is a real catch-22. We need minerals to power modern life, but their extraction causes damage and in many cases there aren't enough to go around.
Responsible Mining Challenges
5:21So, the question becomes, can we get these resources responsibly and sustainably? Dwayne, what do you think? Reply hazy, try again. Come on. Luckily, geologists have ideas. One is to design technologies that use less of these minerals in the first place. Basically, make stuff that's more mineral efficient, which we've done before.
5:40The amount of silver used in the cells that make up solar panels dropped 80% in a decade. And electric vehicle batteries use way less cobalt today than they used to. When it comes to other electronic devices like phones and computers, planned obsolescence is a major problem. That's a strategy manufacturers use to give their products shorter lifespans so that consumers have to buy new ones.
Efficient Design and Green Tech
6:04Instead, tech companies can commit to green design. That means developing products with recycling and repair in mind so that devices last longer and are easier to recycle. Or just like how appliances have efficiency standards, governments can introduce standards that require mineral efficiency. And recycling is a big part of the equation.
6:22E-waste, or electronic equipment that's been discarded, makes up a huge amount of global waste. 62 million metric tons in 2022 alone. That's about 11 times as heavy as the Great Pyramid of Giza. A third of that waste is small electronic devices like toys, microwaves, vacuums, and vapes. And less than a quarter was properly recycled.
6:45Properly being the keyword. Historically, e-waste recycling, also known as urban mining, has been a huge mess of ecological and ethical issues. Most e-waste is generated by high-income countries who ship it off to lower-income countries for recycling and disposal with little regulation. And a lot of times, that means workers, including children, manually breaking apart the electronics, which exposes them and their environments to harmful chemicals and substances.
E-Waste and Urban Mining
7:15So, e-waste recycling needs to be ethical and sustainable to have a truly positive impact. A 2024 report from the United Nations found that just 1% of rare earth element demand is met by e-waste recycling. We could get so much more out of urban mining if we just had the proper infrastructure. And we're already seeing some of this in action.
7:39There's a growing trend of e-waste getting sent back to high-income countries that have the resources for sustainable recycling. Several countries like Croatia, South Korea, and India have been rolling out programs that require companies that make electronics to handle the e-waste they generate. As of 2012, the European Union requires all its members to provide a free e-waste recycling system.
7:59It's called the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive, aka the WEEE Directive. As for what we can do, for starters, we can properly recycle old phones, laptops, tablets, and chargers at electronic recycling centers in our area instead of throwing them away. Better yet, repair and use them as long as possible, only swapping for the next big thing when you really need to.
8:21My phone right here is a used and refurbished one. We can put pressure on tech companies to take on more environmental responsibility, and on governments to regulate e-waste production and disposal. These approaches, better regulation, more corporate responsibility, recycling when possible, can be applied to many different minerals we need, from lithium to aluminum.
8:46One day, we could have a circular economy where all discarded stuff feeds directly into making new stuff. Like scientists from the Critical Materials Institute at Ames National Laboratory in Iowa have developed an environmentally friendly way of recovering rare earth metals from old hard drives. Those metals could then be used in new hard drives, used in data centers across the world.
Circular Economy and Geologists
9:09Data centers are actually what the cloud is, if you can believe it. When it comes down to it, these big, complex problems require big, complex solutions. Whatever the paths forward, they'll require collaboration from all kinds of people. And geologists will be a part of that. They're researching how lithium deposits form and how to mine them more safely.
9:30They're scoping out untapped sources of critical minerals, and they're testing more sustainable ways of extracting them. Maybe someday you'll be part of that work yourself and come up with questions no one has thought to ask yet. We humans have depended on minerals for thousands of years [music] and that's not slowing down anytime soon.
9:47Modern life is literally built on tiny precious [music] pieces of Earth. Now the challenge is figuring out how to mine and use those materials more responsibly so our future can be built on them, too. Next time we'll learn what Earth's hottest period can tell us about today's climate crisis. See you then.
10:03Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Geology which was filmed in our studio Indianapolis, Indiana. It was made with the help of all these nice people. If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever, you can join our community on Patreon.
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