In her 16-year career in the mining industry, Renee Grogan has battled hostile environments, arduous work conditions, and the perception that women don’t belong at a mine site—let alone in a mining-company boardroom. But her biggest battle has only just begun: getting climate-conscious car buyers to care as much about how the metals going into their new electric-vehicle (EV) batteries are mined as they do about their carbon emissions.
“Consumers don’t generally know what their metal footprint looks like,” says Grogan, the co-founder and chief sustainability officer of California-based Impossible Mining, a battery-metal mining startup.
“But if you are driving an electric car because you think you are doing good for the world, wouldn’t you want to make sure your car battery isn’t actually making things worse?” As demand for EVs rises, so too does the need for the metals that go into their batteries—nickel, cobalt, copper, and lithium, among others.
With land-based mines already at peak production and dogged by allegations of environmental and human-rights abuses, mining companies are looking to the Pacific Ocean, where trillions of potato-like nuggets made up of nickel, cobalt, and manganese are strewn across the floor of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone.
For the rest of this article: https://time.com/6166174/seabed-mining-environmental-impact/