This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here. To build all of the solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicle batteries, and other technologies necessary to fight climate change, we’re going to need a lot more metals. Mining those metals from the Earth creates damage and pollution that threaten ecosystems and communities.
“It’s a lot of hassle to collect and separate out” rare-earth magnets for recycling, Baldé said. Despite the EV and wind energy sectors’ fast-growing rare-earth needs, “there is no push from the market or legislators to recover them.” The metals present in e-waste aren’t necessarily useful for every climate tech application even when they are recycled. Take nickel. The lithium-ion batteries inside electric vehicles gobble up huge amounts of the stuff — over 300,000 metric tons in 2022.