Do not take things from the ground and spread them on the Earth's Surface

A look at the example of copper

Taking things from the ground - copper

Copper is ubiquitous. There are four different wires on my desk. One connects this computer to an outlet. Another carries electricity to a light. A third awaits connecting the computer to a phone, and the fourth only works when connecting the computer to headphones. All contain copper, a metal that readily conducts electricity, the most adaptable form of energy we use. It is in every electronic item in our household and the phone we carry in our pocket. It gives us the ability to tap the surplus energy in the flow of electrons, arguably the greatest scientific leap of the 19^th century. Copper is the driving factor of our global consumer economy. If we ever run out of copper our whole modern commercial ecosystem will halt (Conway, 2023).

I picked copper as a prime example of what we take out of the Earth and spread around on the surface because it is common, everywhere, and diminishing as an available resource. It was also the first element that made me aware of how far we would go to find it and use it. I was almost 13 when my family took a trip to Yellowstone National Park from Seattle. Along the route we drove through Butte, Montana. On the northeast side of town, completely dominating the landscape, is a giant hole, now partly filled with water called the Berkeley Pit. It is not a swimming hole. The pit was once 1,780 feet (nearly 600 meters) deep, now filled with 1,000 feet of acidic water, a toxic stew of side effects of the mining industry, dug first to extract rich copper ore. Water level in the pit is kept below the level where toxins can leach out impacting local streams. The mine is right on the Continental divide, so poisons could flow both directions if allowed to do so (Watch, 2024). This is the legacy of one mine, now under control of the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) who are tasked with keeping the water level below the escape elevation. The mine was opened in 1955 by the Anaconda Mining Company, which was purchased by ARCO, and closed in 1982. How long it will need monitoring is unknown, but those toxins don’t go away easily.

Copper is an element pursued globally. The global leaders at this writing are Chile and Peru. Peru produces more ore and concentrates by weight, but the ore quality is lower than that of Chile, so has less value on the market. This is the present problem. At first the copper ore found was of high quality, rocks of almost pure copper oxides, copper sulfates, or other ore types. But the percentage of copper in rocks mined now has dropped. When a company extracts an ore, sometimes 98% stays behind as mining waste, piled on the ground near the mining shafts or pits, leaching their other contents into the local environment. The other contents often include a host of toxic elements like lead, cadmium, chromium, mercury, arsenic, and radioactive elements, combining to form acidic compounds that are mobile in water. For copper alone, mines are found in 79 countries. How many of these have an effective EPA equivalent? How many can mandate that a mining company is responsible for cleaning up its own mess?

Once the ore is transferred to the market, it gets refined into the copper we use daily. Some becomes wire of various thicknesses. Some is wound into electric motors now used in refrigeration, transportation, pumping systems, electric cars and much more. Some become pipes carrying water, though we have switched to plastic piping as copper prices rise. As we transition from fossil fuel transportation to electric vehicles, demand for copper grows. As we switch from fossil fuel powered heating systems to heat pump heating and air conditioning, demand for copper swells. All this happens as we mine copper from ever shrinking quality ores. Ed Conway explains that companies are now examining mining waste and slag heaps to see if the quality of discarded ore might match that of low quantity ores now counted as profitable (Conway, 2023).

Copper’s toll at the source is not limited to toxic chemicals, acid mine drainage, and deep pit or shaft landscape scars. It also takes a toll on the lives of those hired to extract it from the ground. This is likely true throughout the history of mining, but the tale today is stronger, with more detail. I worked in Africa, mostly in what is now South Sudan, Kenya and Mozambique. None of these countries were known for copper, but neighboring countries, Zambia and Democratic Republic of the Congo were. Mines attracted labor, and the labor came from within and outside the countries. The copper belt, as it is called, extended along the border of these two countries, from Solwezi, Zambia, over to Lubumbashi in DRC and south to Ndola, back in Zambia. Numerous open pit mines dot this region, complete with nearby mining waste and slag heaps around the processing centers. Low wage miners working long hours mostly lived away from their families in hostels, inexpensive multiple occupancy dorms near the mines. They ate communally, but paid for it from wages. With no families nearby, sex work was common for women living near the hostels. This arrangement came from the colonial era, but was expanded by corporations extracting the copper, and it worked unnoticed through independence until the 1980s. Then came AIDS. It came as an unknown, stealth killer at first, spread sexually once it got into the sex worker community, then moved out with the miners when they went home for their annual leave, penetrating almost every town and village in southern Africa. By the 1990s AIDS was the leading cause of death in many countries, infecting anywhere from 15 to 50 percent of the population. It was not long before epidemiologists identified mines and mine workers as major victims and vectors of the virus. Mining companies did next to nothing beyond some publicity and introduction of condoms. They left it to the international community to provide resources to combat the disease.

Just as an aside, recently Elon Musk made the stupid claim that USAID spent $50,000,000 on condoms for Gaza. He thought that was Gaza of the Israel-Palestine conflict. It wasn’t. Gaza is a province in southern Mozambique, bordering South Africa. Men from Gaza Province and other Mozambican provinces frequently went to South Africa and Botswana to work in gold, diamond, and other metal mines. The hostel system, sex work, and AIDS, thrived there as well. My daughter, adopted in Mozambique when we worked there, likely had birth parents who died of AIDS. Her birth father was listed as being a miner in South Africa. USAID until just three weeks ago, was the leading provider of AIDS prevention (condoms) and AIDS antiviral drugs in the southern African region. Stopping the work of USAID is a criminal act. It kills, and many of the victims are newborns. One of the medications is used specifically to stop the transmission of AIDS to the newborn in the birth canal. Our daughter did not get AIDS in this fashion. She was tested at 8 months.

Mined copper goes everywhere. You use it right now reading this. It is a major resource expense in all electronics. This is an issue with its use. Metals are normally used in pure, or near pure form, and therefore can cycle almost endlessly as a technical nutrient in our commercial system. The term “technical nutrient” comes from a book called Cradle to Cradle by Bill McDonough and Michael Braungart (McDonough, 2002). Their main point was that we need to treat materials like nature treats nutrients, recycling them in non-toxic ways that benefit life. In order to do this, we must think about the end of life of a technical nutrient as we design products. Instead, we design deliberately for planned obsolescence. Steve Jobs was explicit about this with the design of computers and I-phones. Don’t let consumers fix the product, don’t make it so it will last. Make the product so consumers become addicted to it and will buy a new model as soon as theirs breaks, or ceases to function well. This thinking, to McDonough and Braungart, is the opposite of cradle-to-cradle thinking.

Phones, computers, tablets, and increasingly every appliance in our house has cradle-to-grave thinking in its design and manufacture. They all contain copper. The copper is not easily separated from the other metal and non-metal components. When your computer fails, it often goes elsewhere for disposal, sometimes a near shore landfill in west Africa, Ghana, to use an example. There is a lot of value inside a phone or computer that is not cost effective to extract in Europe or North America. Cradle to Cradle calls the cell phone a “monstrous hybrid” because it combines different raw materials in ways costly to separate. For a poor Ghanaian boy, the landfill is a copper mine. These boys find an old phone or laptop, burn off the plastic, breathing toxic fumes, then clip apart the metals to the best of their ability with the tools available, selling the products of their extraction to the nearest available market, mostly at below market prices. The system of labor injustice exists at both ends of the supply chain. It is the same with environmental costs. Leaching from the Ghanaian electronics landfills poison nearby water bodies. Burning creates toxic air pollution, even producing carcinogens like dioxin, a chlorinated compound considered one of the worst pollutants on the planet. For us, this is an invisible cost, but for a pediatric oncologist it is a real cost of our system (Robert, 2008).

Taking copper from the ground and spreading it across the earth’s surface is a daily occurrence, but it is not a forever one. It is a limited resource, even on a human time scale, at the rate we are using it. Demand continues to increase, but supply drops. When the supply drops below demand, price spikes and resource wars commence. Now add a host of other extractable resources we use as technical nutrients in our consumer economy. Ed Conway examines 5 more in his book: sand, salt, oil, lithium, and iron. Others can easily add to this list: cobalt, nickel, chromium, manganese, vanadium, niobium, neodymium, tantalum and more. All involve mining. All have potentially toxic environmental impact. All are produced without adequate protections for the environment, or the humans involved in doing the extraction or harvest for reuse of these elements.

There is no way to end this without leaving the reader hanging. The author is hanging in the same place. The system we live within requires change, and as yet we lack a widespread vision of what that change should be. Before tackling this huge question, in even a limited fashion, we should look at the other three rules given by Karl Henrik Robert: Do not make things unknown to nature and spread them out on the earth’s surface. Do not harvest renewable resources at a faster rate than they can recover. Do not allow a skewing of resources to a select part of the human population. Look for them in the coming posts.

Works Cited

Conway, E. (2023). Material World: The Six Raw Materials that Shape Modern Civilization. Penguin.

McDonough, B. (2002). Cradle to Cradle. North Point Press.

Robert, K. H. (2008). The Natural Step Story: Seed a Quiet Revolution. Stockholm: New Catalyst Books.

Watch, P. (2024). Protective Water Level. Retrieved from Pit Watch: https://pitwatch.org/learn/protective-water-level/