Hi everyone. This week has been absolutely awful. I hope you are well-supported and taking care of yourself right now. Here’s some mineral-related stories and mineral-adjacent readings that I took in this week.
Federal policy and critical minerals news: The Department of Energy announced a bunch of newly funded research into rare earths (full list of awardees here, though a lot of it reads as esoteric as hell) and a bunch of new lab-industry partnerships for battery innovation. On the partnerships side, most of the projects described are lithium-related; two of them are with mining company Albemarle, which owns the only operational lithium brine facility in the United States (although right now it's actually suspended, curious if/how the DOE partnership will affect or is related to this). I need to spend a little more time poking around at these new projects and the companies associated with them, but in general just another reminder of the slow steady progression of federal funding for this kind of stuff.
The Army Corps of Engineers released a statement on August 24 that a new mine project in Alaska, Pebble Mine, could not receive permits based on its original proposal because it isn't in accordance with the Clean Water Act. (Side note: the Army Corps of Engineers' press contact is named CRYSTAL X. BORING, which is some high-level weird comic book character shit.) The decision to block the mine comes sort of as a surprise considering how uh, deeply into fucking Alaska the Trump administration has been, not to mention the Pebble deposit has a fuck-ton of the rare earth element rhenium (a fact disclosed last week, unclear if that was in an effort t keep the project alive). But lots of high-level figures including Donald Trump Jr. oppose the project, in part because of the risk it poses to the nearby Bristol Bay salmon fishery. Score one for Big Fish, I guess?
Not that this is surprising, but Apple, Google, Dell, Tesla, and Microsoft filed a joint motion to dismiss a class action lawsuit brought against them concerning child labor used in cobalt mines the companies source from. The lawsuit was filed in late 2019 and represents parents of children killed in mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Honestly, I have mixed feelings about this. In terms of just distributing reparations, a lawsuit like this kind of makes sense. I'm all for taking money from these companies, they have too much! Whether it could meaningfully change conditions in DRC? Apple and Google actually probably can't do that. There's also sort of a depressing optics tactic at play here, the same one that's been central to the conflict minerals narrative since the early 2000s. Tech companies are much more familiar household names than mining companies. It sucks that advocacy groups are in a position where to get Western media (and Western funder) attention for the victims of horrifying labor conditions, that harm has to be attached to a familiar brand. Ultimately, I'm not very optimistic for this lawsuit. (Article will probably show up as paywalled so I put a PDF of it and the related motion here.)
Less a "current event" and more a "reflection of how we live with minerals" item: an article in an emergency medical services publication on best practices for treating patients with lithium battery burns (caution: some gnarly burn images included in the post).
This text in ArtForum from Brazilian artist Tiago Gualberto on his multi-year mixed media project exploring the legacy of extraction and corruption in his home state of Minas Gerais is well worth your time, especially if you're not familiar with the Inhotim Center for Contemporary Art (I wasn't, and this 2018 story from Businessweek is a trip).