A bombshell new study has revealed that tens of millions of people have been exposed to toxic waste as a result of the push to transition to “green” energy.
23 million people, more than the population of Florida, are now exposed to toxic runoff from metal mining.
The report warns of the devastating impacts of a reckless transition to “green” energy.
Mining demand for minerals needed for electric vehicle batteries has polluted 500,000 km of rivers and destroyed 16 million acres of farmland.
The researchers found that 23 million people worldwide, as well as 5.72 million livestock, more than 16 million acres of irrigated farmland and more than 297,800 miles of rivers, have been contaminated by the toxic byproducts of the mining that seeped into the water.
This mining of metals includes many so-called “rare earth elements” essential for the manufacture of high-tech solar cells, wind turbines and the batteries needed to store sustainable “green” energy.
While the new study focuses on environmental impacts, global metals mining has recently faced shocking lawsuits against major tech companies, including Apple, Google, Microsoft and Tesla.
The companies have been accused of supporting child slavery in the Congo, where 70% of the industry’s cobalt comes from.
“The rapid growth of global metal mining is crucial if the world is to transition to green energy,” said Chris Thomas, a zoologist at the University of Lincoln whose specialty is space ecology and threats. for global water supply.
Thomas led the analysis and modeling work for the new study, which was published today in Science.
Thomas and his colleagues have developed a new database, supported by on-the-ground evidence, that now maps the hundreds of square miles of rivers and floodplains polluted by these industrial processes around the world.
They found that the devastation caused by this pollution was widespread, affecting an estimated 297,800 miles (479,200 km) of river systems in total and more than 63,000 square miles (164,000 km²) of floodplains worldwide.
But North America stands out as the most affected.
The United States and Canada have 123,280 miles of polluted river systems and approximately 10.7 million acres of polluted floodplains.
But the damage wasn’t much better in South America, with 50,766 miles of rivers and more than 9.5 million acres of floodplain affected.
In Asia, the continent has about 37,842 river miles and about 8.3 million acres of flood plains contaminated by metal mining waste.
Mark Macklin, director of the university’s Lincoln Center for Water and Planetary Health, who led the international team behind the new research, said he expects the new study’s maps and modeling tools will help prevent future reckless mines .
“We hope this will make it easier to mitigate the environmental effects of historical and current mining,” Macklin said.
“Our new method for predicting the dispersal of mining waste in river systems provides governments, environmental regulators, the mining industry and local communities with a tool that will, for the first time, allow them to assess the off-site and downstream impacts of mining in ecosystem and human health”.
Concerns about how bad the ecological impact of metals mining can be for sustainable technology are complicated by the diverse range of resources involved, which can lead to “apples to oranges” comparisons.
According to MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative, green energy technologies like wind turbines and electric cars often require far more mined minerals than current fossil fuel infrastructure.
An electric car, for example, requires six times more metal and mineral materials than a car with a combustion engine, the MIT university team reports.
Meanwhile, a wind farm requires nine times more of these extracted compounds than a traditional gas plant.
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