The prevailing narrative is that a low-carbon future is achievable only if we rely on expanded mining – a resource-intensive sector that would provide the minerals needed for the mass and quick deployment of renewable energy solutions. Having been extracted for decades already, nickel, cobalt, and lithium, among others, are now branded as critical minerals for various wind, solar, battery storage, and electric vehicle (EV) applications.
The line that “mining is needed for development” brings back a long history of conflicts with communities and social movements that have compelled international financial institutions like World Bank (WB) and Asian Development Bank (ADB) to establish safeguards policies and avoid funding mining activities for decades. For the ADB, it was its entanglement with Marcopper, which unleashed the largest environmental disaster in Philippine history, that stopped the money for mining. At the dawn of clean energy transition, however, those days are gone.
The ADB’s recently released board direction for critical mining joins the choir of financial institutions following the WB’s Climate Smart Mining (CSM) framework, which centers on four pillars: climate mitigation, climate adaptation, reducing material impacts, and creating market opportunities. The CSM focused on the importance of a circular economy centered on recycling – a convenient cop-out for environmentally-destructive practices.
The circular economy has been popular in the ADB’s portfolios, but it has to be understand that this concept is not just about recycling. It involves a systemic shift, starting with reducing material use first, then redesigning better systems and products, and then reusing, repairing, refurbishing, and finally recycling to keep materials in use for as long as possible. This order of priority ensures the least pressure on resources and the smallest level of carbon emissions. Most importantly, circularity needs to be placed in context.
But reducing production is not on the ADB or WB’s agenda. The WB projects demand for critical minerals such as graphite, lithium, and cobalt, could increase by nearly 500 percent by 2050, something that would require intense mining activities on a dying planet.
Civil society has documented the environmental and social issues across the lifecycle of “clean energy” technologies – from nickel mining and manufacturing, to the harms to workers in Indonesia and Malaysia, to end-of-life issues in the Philippines. Given those costs, it is unacceptable to see used minerals in landfills. But can recycling offset the impacts of mining as the industry claims it could? The WB itself said that “further extraction will still be required to supply the critical minerals needed to produce these low-carbon technologies even with large future increases in recycling rates.”
But the ADB seems to be coming down on the side of toxic positivity. Its board paper stated that the region can benefit from recycled critical minerals, which are projected to increase fivefold to $200 billion by 2050 under current policies. In case the IPCC memo skipped the ADB boardroom, we don’t have until 2050. We need to keep global temperatures at 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2030. Unfortunately, the ADB intends to incorporate this thinking into its Energy Policy, which is currently undergoing a mid-term review process.
For EV batteries, industry claims rosy recovery rates of almost 90 percent, but currently only about 5 percent of batteries are recycled effectively globally. Too many factors affect the success of recycling for critical minerals, from logistical issues to the lack of end-to-end information on battery designs, as well as the lack of profitability for recycled materials, and the lack of technologies that are proven safe. In Asia, the fundamental infrastructure of waste collection is lacking; hence, recycling manufacturers might end up importing EV waste to get secondary raw material for recycled EV batteries, which has happened with lead acid battery recycling in the past.
This underscores the ambiguous purpose of pushing recycling as the marker of critical mineral circularity: if there are other more sustainable options, why persist with recycling? As pointed out by the NGO Forum on ADB, the bank’s approach to Critical Minerals to Clean Energy Technologies, which banks on recycling as a key strategy for sustainability, has largely been couched in the language of “economic benefits,” the rhetoric of which “often reinforces exploitative practices accompanied by violence and militarization, deepening inequalities and conflict in resource-rich developing nations.”
In short, circularity cannot be divorced from the profiteering interests that perpetuate its presence in development strategies concerning waste. Circularity will just embed itself into existing systems that have helped perpetuate the climate crisis, especially in countries that do not have adequate end-of-life policies yet. Without regulated and safe end-of-life policies in place, the most vulnerable people, such as informal e-waste collectors, will be impacted, which adds to the growing list of human rights concerns in the entire value chain of renewable energy technologies.
GAIA, a global movement of environmental justice advocates, says this lax policy environment also leads to the crossborder movement of EV battery waste, which poses problems especially for Global South countries that have historically borne the brunt of managing the waste that Global North countries cannot or refuse to handle or process.
Instead of curating increased demands for critical minerals and focusing so closely on recycling, the ADB must first ensure that real energy needs are met through meaningful consultations and collaborations with communities, especially those affected by big ticket projects. It must also adopt a truly holistic approach to managing waste outside the regimes of disposability and profitability.
Then the ADB needs to invest in options that rank higher in terms of sustainability. With EV batteries, for instance, aside from exploring other battery chemistries that rely less on critical minerals, financing can flow into systems that make repurposing a priority. This also requires producers to look at battery designs that rely less on proprietorship, from the actual physical design of parts to the digital infrastructure of battery management systems. By designing batteries with repurposing and not disposability in mind, their lifespan can be increased, easing the demand for critical minerals from the EV sector.
By listening to communities and approaching renewable energy development with real circularity in mind, the ADB’s Energy Policy can define what a genuine climate energy solution should look like: people-led and planet-centered.