Zimbabwe’s first plant to process clean-energy metal lithium – of which it is Africa’s top producer – is up and running, a milestone in its expanding drive to stop the wholesale export of its raw mineral wealth.
Zimbabwe’s first plant to process clean-energy metal lithium – of which it is Africa’s top producer – is up and running, a milestone in its expanding drive to stop the wholesale export of its raw mineral wealth.
Raise your hand if you think it’ll be good for the local environment or workers
Zimbabwe was already mining the lithium, so the environmental damage was already happening. What’s new here is that it’s now processing it locally. This means Zimbabwe gets a bigger percentage of the money that’s made from this lithium. A nation’s resources should be profitable primarily to itself.
Additionally, exporting for processing is more environmentally damaging than doing it locally because when you export, then in addition to whatever damage is done by processing, you also get all the environmental damage that comes from all that transportation. Eliminating the transportation at least removes one unnecessary element of environmental damage in an industrial chain that would exist one way or the other.
I mean, sure, here’s mine. Exporting raw minerals is basically the worst thing a country can do for its workers and environment.
Its built by Chinese-owned Prospect Lithium Zimbabwe (PLZ) so i dont know how itll be any better than exporting it raw
Zimbabwe can tax the profits from mining AND the profits from processing. Additionally, doing it locally means that Zimbabwean workers get the work, and that the knowhow for doing it becomes local knowledge. Furthermore, this is merely a stepping stone, as Zimbabwe plans to develop a domestic industry for manufacturing batteries with this processed lithium. If you’ve ever seen Rules for Rulers by CGP Grey, you’ll be familiar with the concept that the more a national economy depends on raw resources, the more prone it is to exploitation and oppression, whereas the more a national economy depends on advanced manufacturing, the harder it is for a dictator to exploit, since it means national prosperity depends on a highly-educated workforce, which is antithetical to how brutal dictatorships work.
This isn’t a Chinese initiative. Zimbabwe has banned the export of raw lithium, meaning that Chinese companies were forced to move processing here. There’s no doubt that China wants to exploit Africa as much as it can, but Zimbabwe at least has figured out how to prevent itself from getting completely taken advantage of, and is leveraging its position to turn itself into a more advanced economy.
Obviously not.
Gonna be like China and destroy their environment, between lithium and “rare earth mineral” mining.