Environmental and social challenges of the

mining of critical metals

1
Overview

• Critical metals?

• Criticality of metal
• Essentiality
• Availability

2
Critical metals
• Our present-day wellness is sustained by metals.

• metals and its products are crucial for the actual economy and daily wellbeing .

• The metal market is analysed continuously due to its dynamic nature, driven by numerous reasons (war, cycle,
recession, technology, inflation, etc) which induce certain metals become more relevant than others, this derives on
critical metals concept.

Criticality of metals
Nowadays one widely used methodology applied by the US National Research Council (2008) and European
Commission (2014) to detect the critical metals utilizing a criticality matrix based on two parameters:

1) essentiality

2) availability.
5 critical metals

1) Rare Earths

2) Platinum group metals

3) Indium

4) Niobium

5) Gallium.

4
Rare Earths
• Rare earths occur naturally in the earth crust and occur in very small amounts, so called rare earths.

• A total of 17 rare earth metals, some of them are scandium, yttrium, cerium, lanthanum etc.

• Are mostly used as catalysts and used in the manufacturing of electronics, magnets, dyes, lasers, and
batteries.

• Major producers are China and U.S.A of the rare earths.

• Lanthanum is a rare earth metal found by Swedish chemist Carl Gustaf Mosander in 1839, who was able to
remove it from a sample of cerium nitrate .

• lanthanum means ‘to lie hidden’ in Ancient Greek.

Rare Earth Metals (REE)
 17 rare earth metals
  Minerals symbol Properties and application
1 Scandium Sc
2 Yttrium Y
3 Lanthanum La REE metals anatomically similar with same
chemical properties and separation of one from
4 Cerium Ce another is a Himalayan task.
5 Praseodymium Pr

6 Neodymium Nd
7 Promethium Pm General properties of REE metals are: High
8 Samarium Sm refractive index and low thermal expansion.
9 Europium Eu
10 Gadolinium Gd
11 Terbium Tb All REE elements have unique electronic and
12 Dysprosium Dy magnetic properties.
13 Holmium Ho
14 Erbium Er
Rare earth metals are mostly used as catalysts and
15 Thulium Tm used in the manufacturing of electronics,
16 Ytterbium Yb magnets, dyes, lasers, and batteries.
17 Lutetium Lu
• Lanthanum

• Lanthanum is a rare earth metal with a number 57 in the

periodic table and having atomic mass of 138.91 g/mol.
• Lanthanum was found as an impurity in the cerium
nitrate.
• Monazite and Bastnäsite are the most common ores from
which Lanthanum is mined today.
• Lanthanum is also found in Allanite and Cerite – these
ores are not mined to produce lanthanum.
• major mining regions for the ores are the United States,
Brazil, India, Sri Lanka, and Australia, which account for
12,500 mt/year of global lanthanum output.
• Application

• useful for storing hydrogen gas in hydrogen-powered vehicles in the future.

• mostly used as a coating for glass

• Manufacturing of carbon arc electrodes for film/photographic

studio lighting and floodlighting.

• Aerospace, hybrid electric vehicles and consumer electronics

• Environmental impacts

• causes human rights violation, deforestation and contamination of land and water.

• causes noise and ground vibrations.

• causing environmental pollution and considered as public nuisance.

• most of the rare earth metals have toxic properties.

• Exposure to these metals directly causes cancer, respiratory problems, dental loss and sometimes even leads
to death.

• pollution from disposal of massive amounts of e-waste, which releases vast amounts of REE into the subsoil
and ground water, is rapidly emerging.

• Electronic industry produces up to 41 million tonnes of e-waste per year.

Platinum Group Metals
• Platinum - by-product from nickel plus copper mining and processing .

• The developing prominence of platinum group metals (or PGMs, including platinum and palladium) for a
wide scope of utilizations prompts some fascinating issues for mining and maintainability.

• The mining, metal extraction, and beneficiation stages are joined via air and water contamination.

• As platinum is a heavy metal it can cause several health problems when combined with its salts.

• Platinum is non-harmful and non-reactive in its metallic form.

• Notwithstanding, it responds marginally with different substances noticeable all around, and with body
liquids.

• These responses produce a wide scope of platinum compounds.

• Practically all platinum compounds are harmful. Most have low poisonousness, some have medium
harmfulness, a couple is profoundly poisonous.

• Each compound has an alternate harmfulness profile and delivers various manifestations.

• Properties
• Malleable

• ductile

• anti-corrosive
• Application
• high demand for platinum in the automotive, petroleum, jewellery, and electronics industries.

• Today more than 500 million engine vehicles are outfitted with reactant convertors, heaving another 0.4–1.4
huge loads of platinum each year.

• Evironmental impacts
• A low level of platinum in the environment does not have that much effect on human health but miners
working in the mining of Platinum can face serious and fatal health problems.

• Research shows that malignant tumours of the lungs have been seen in platinum miners.

• Little particles of platinum become significantly more reactive and are bound to shape intensifies that are
assimilated into the body.

• Such mixtures can frame the lungs and skin.

• lead to skin allergies.

• Individuals with high contact levels experience manifestations, for example, weariness and windedness
when their blood levels are multiple times better than average.

• Individuals who live in high-traffic regions and areas close to platinum mines ordinarily have blood and pee
levels around multiple times better than average.

• Major health problems caused by platinum salts include cancer, damage to the intestine and kidneys,
hearing defects, and changes in DNA.
 Indium
• Indium is the element number forty-nine in the periodic table, with a mass weight of 114,82g/mol.

• Its discovery has been attributed to Ferdinan Reich in 1863.

• Its name originates from its spectrum colour blue indigo.

• The abundancy of this metal on nature is in the order of 0.1 ppm.

• as a comparison it has a similar nature concentration as the mercury and silver.

• The main resources in the planet are in China (47%), and 25% between Peru, Canada, Australia, and United
States, the remaining 28% in other countries.

• The commercial production of this metal is originated as a sub product of the refinery of zinc, copper, silver,
lead, and tin .
• The annual world production of this metal from primary refined processing, coming from ore treatment, was
770 ton on 2013 .

• While secondary refined resources, recycling from pre-existing manufactured products, was in the order of
610 tonnes in 2013.

• The 84% of the recovered metal, 510 tonnes, where coming from the recycling of end-of-life products
around the manufacturing cluster in Asia .

• indium is hosted in the same sulphides ore where is commonly found zinc, copper, lead, and silver.

• Indium is considered as a crucial commodity for the world’s technology growth, thus considered as a Critical
Metal for the main developed and leading countries.

• Indium application on people’s everyday devices make it a vital commodity for the industry.
• Application
• The Indium-Tin-Oxide (ITO) is a translucent and electric conductive substance used for manufacturing LCD
screens.

• Indium solder alloys are widely used in the electronic industry which has characteristics of inhibiting gold
leaching in electronic apparatus.

• High thermal conductive films for electronics heat dissipation.

• The laser diodes used for fibre optics communications utilize indium phosphides compounds.

• The production of photovoltaic cells requires an alloy of copper-indium-gallium-selenide (Schuyler, 2017).

• Outputs
• The outputs of this processes are

1. metallic commodity

2. Sulphide gases

3. CO2, CO

4. waste waters

5. heavy metal reactive lodes

6. Machinery-end-of-life cycle

7. gangue material, and others indirectly related.

• Environmental impacts
• Each of the outputs mentioned has a certain potential impact on the environment and social life of the people
if they are not controlled and managed.

• The assets and liabilities management of the Indium industry and their impact will be reflected on the following
parameters

• Air quality and Underground Water quality

• recycling product at its end of life

• greenhouse gases

• rehabilitation of mining land

• post processing of tailings and muds

• employee’s health and safety, and indigenous communities.

conclusion