By Martin Brook*
When Resources Minister Shane Jones recently unveiled his draft strategy for mineral mining, it was quickly criticised by the Labour opposition as “taking New Zealand backwards”. One environmental group even called it a “love letter to mining companies”.
But the government’s ambition to double the sector’s export value to NZ$2 billion by 2035, with flow-on effects for local employment and regional economies, deserves a broader debate.
In particular, New Zealanders opposed to mineral mining must ask whether it is ethically fair and reasonable to effectively outsource the risks of mining to other countries, while benefiting from the modern technologies those minerals make possible.
The government’s mining strategy aims to produce a list of “critical minerals” for exploration. The International Energy Agency identifies minerals such as copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt and rare earth elements as essential components in many of today’s rapidly growing clean energy technologies – from wind turbines and electricity networks to electric vehicles.
Indeed, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, these critical minerals are increasingly necessary for decarbonising energy systems. One of the three pillars of the draft minerals strategy is the delivery of minerals “for a clean energy transition”. How we source those minerals is an important question.
Environmental impacts of mining
New Zealand has a rich mining history, with a wide variety of resources still extracted from underground and opencast mines. There is also a long history of opposition to mining, especially in national parks and on conservation land, as well as on privately owned hill country.
And there are legitimate concerns about the environmental, social and governance implications of mining. First, it can have devastating environmental effects, especially the extraction of high-value critical minerals that often require enormous “strip ratios” and generate huge volumes of waste rock tailings that must be stored.
Put simply, the strip ratio represents the amount of waste material (also known as overburden) that must be moved to extract a given amount of ore. For example, an overburden thickness of 100 metres and an ore thickness of 50 metres would yield a strip ratio of 2:1.
The actual concentration (known as the “grade”) of the target metal within the ore is the other factor to consider. For example, copper ore usually contains about 0.5% to 2% copper. A high-grade ore may be extracted from a mine with a high strip ratio, potentially generating enormous volumes of waste rock.
The waste is crushed, liquidised into slurry and pumped behind tailings dams, where it desiccates over time. Tailings dams are constructed to grow in height over decades as the mine progresses.
Effective management is integral to the safety of a mine and any downstream population. Tailings dam failures can lead to high-velocity flood disasters. But the well managed and stable tailings storage facility at OceanaGold’s Martha mine at Waihi shows what can be achieved with sufficient engineering and environmental regulation.
Offshoring our environmental footprint
Second, mineral extraction has caused and fuelled decades of unrest and civil war in some countries. The minerals most associated with funding conflict – the “three Ts” of tin, tungsten and tantalum – are present in many everyday products such as smartphones and laptops. Tantalum in particular is listed as a “conflict mineral” by the European Union.
According to the US Geological Survey, the source of tantalum has dramatically changed in recent years. In 2000, Australia produced 45% of global tantalum concentrates, but by 2014 this had dropped to 4%, offset by extraction in the mineral-rich but war-torn Katanga province of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
New Zealand is hardly in the same category. But the country’s mineral deposits are often found in mountainous areas, formed by the heat and pressure associated with tectonic processes over millions of years. Often these upland areas are beautiful national parks.
At the same time, New Zealand will need to use extracted minerals – either from its own mining operations or those of other countries – to make the transition to green energy and maintain present standards of living.
By not exploring the mineral mining potential in its own backyard, while simultaneously consuming those minerals from other sources, New Zealand is conveniently offshoring its own environmental footprint.
To assume foreign landscapes and environments are more expendable raises serious ethical and moral questions that need to be addressed within the current debate over the government’s draft mining strategy.
Mining is no longer an unwanted, dirty industry pic.twitter.com/R9kR3opW2g
— Shane Jones (@mangonui08) May 20, 2024
Reciprocity and obligation
One response might be for New Zealand, where it can, to look at extracting and exporting minerals within its own strict safety and environmental regulations. This would help share the global environmental burden of mineral extraction in a more sustainable way.
Such an approach (which might also be applied to the countries from which we source minerals) also fits with the Māori ethic of reciprocity, tauutuutu. This has been applied to modern economic and environmental thinking, and defined as:
an indigenous concept that places an ethical obligation on communities and enterprises to emphasise balance, reciprocity, and symbiosis in their social and environmental relationships.
Behavioural economics has shown that reciprocal behaviour builds trust, which is crucial for long-term relationships. Countries that embrace reciprocity are better positioned to navigate complex global challenges, achieve UN sustainable development goals, build resilient supply chains, and work toward a green future that energy transition will allow.
In anticipation of the critical minerals list the government has requested, New Zealand needs to consider how it can meet the demands of a new economy, practically as well as morally and ethically.
*Martin Brook, Associate Professor of Applied Geology, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
46 Comments
So we need to mine our way to a greener future?
Nobody wants to hear it but the best way to a greener future is to contract our economy. Less meat consumption, less cars and trucks etc., and of course...less rapacious primates.
I guarantee that extracting every mineral from NZ soil will do sweet F.A for the environment.
so if the shoes are not big enough, we need to cut our feet to fit in?
the only way to go forward is using new technology to improve efficiency of a society. take cars for example, we can replace our petrol fleet to NEV, we may still have the same population, but we will burn less fuel for the same miles traveled. the things we cannot do, and should not do is go back using bicycles to carry food supplies from Levin to Welly, or using a donky cart carrying my 90 year old mother in law from Lyall Bay to hospital. that's crazy!
as long as humans exists, we use fuel and energy. go greener means less emission per capita.
There's a middle ground, where we use refrigerated trucks to move crates of milk around the country but bikes to move them the final few kms from the shop to our house, or active/public transport to move ourselves to a place of work or recreation. There are plenty of cases where cars are used and they are a crazily inefficient solution that makes us less healthy in multiple ways - just because we can doesn't mean we should.
A lot of this stuff sounds good, but it’s purely green aesthetics. What is the emissions saving from moving milk via bikes for the last mile. Probably f all (and that’s ignoring our capped ets, which definitely makes it a waste of time).
It’s just like keep cups and community gardens etc. makes virtue signalling larpers feel good, but does nothing.
Yes, if you're imagining an economy that is largely like what we currently have, but a few bits and pieces substituted out, then no it won't make any practical difference.
But if the economy were to be radically overhauled (through some means), parts of it may resemble that which is described here, and those parts will be contributing to the overall resolution (I'm deliberately not using the word 'solution' here).
But we are still using the minerals.. just letting other people mine them and profit from them... then importing the products that use them. Our refusal to do the mining on 'green' grounds would have no impact on the overall climate change. It just loses us revenue and economic export benefits and protects our environment at the expense of other people's environments.
The argument about whether we should contract the economy is different .. but very important too. Trouble is that the whole world relies too much on GDP growth for their national economies. it would take a global agreement and shift to change it which isn't coming.
If we're mining to become more self sufficient, that's surely good. If we're mining to make a short term profit, that's surely bad. If we're offshoring operations to appear green then paying for their profits by bolstering our environmentally unfriendly milk powder industry, that's surely the worst.
If we're offshoring operations to appear green then paying for their profits by bolstering our environmentally unfriendly milk powder industry, that's surely the worst.
We've done this across the width and breadth of our economy.
Not just to be seen to be green, but also healthy, safe, and caring employers.
I don't quite follow this comment.
Yes, degrowth is grim. If you believe that humanity is going to be forced to constrain its consumption (as I do) due to the world being finite, then it seems some sort of planned degrowth is going to be preferable to the unplanned alternative?
Edit: Ah, this was the powerUPkiwi troll I was replying to, not powerdownkiwi. Now it all makes sense.
Bollocks
Many developed countries have OFFSHORED their emissions - NZ included.
Let's stick to truths here, eh?
Unfortunately, Degrowth is where we're headed. As exponential consumption on a finite planet always was. The options are to organize a different way of living - or wait for this one to crash then pick up the pieces.
I prefer the former.
Realistically though, no politician is ever going to sign off on contracting the economy, nor getting rid of the primates, so how else do we operate this zoo to prepare for a changing climate?
Mining at least gives us the revenue to build for / react to a changing climate, where not mining detracts from our ability to raise revenues to react / prepare for a changing climate, for like it or not, the climate is going to change even if we got rid of all the primates in NZ and ate leaves all day, China / India / Nigeria / <insert-long-list of countries-here> isn't going to stop trying to expand their economies with fossil fuels to lift their people out of poverty just because "its gonna get warm soon" when they're facing "gonna starve now / soon".
Brick - a lot of mixed assumptions there.
Oil is already half-gone, and it was the best half. But wealth is underwritten by energy (no work done equals nothing produced, and it takes energy to do work). So 'lifting themselves out of poverty' is either spin (you know it's a crock) or ignorance. The simple question - of us all - is: What then?
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/
https://escholarship.org/uc/energy_ambitions
come back when you've read them both. :)
Timmyboy,
These are fair points, but no politician is going to stand on a platform of deliberately shrinking the economy and explaining what that would mean. Not only would it downsize the economy , thus reducing what we can afford by way of services, but it would have zero effect on the world outside NZ. Can you imagine China, India, Russia, Indonesia, all the Middle Eastern countries and others, going down the same road?
There is little to be gained if we mine the minerals and then export the raw material for products manufactured elsewhere only to import said products...not to mention the additional freight emissions.
And we appear to have lost the ability/will to consider manufacturing from local resources in NZ.
So long as freight remains cheap, it will always be more cost effective to import the vast array of finished goods that NZ's modern way of life depends upon.
Eventually freight will not be as cheap and/or reliable.
The problem is that when that happens, we won't have much of the way of existing industrial capacity to turn to, and it'll be extremely expensive (if not impractical / impossible) to build.
There was a reason I didnt refer to the 'cost' of transport other than the emissions.
Your last paragraph however does outline our current trajectory.
If we are going to mine at scale we should at least develop the capability to make use of those materials onshore otherwise we are simply (apart from some derisory royalties) exporting both resources and return on capital.
As noted we appear unable/unwilling to do so.
The concentration of minerals is higher in landfills than most ores. First , we need to recycle our waste.
Don't see anyone saying we should only use cars with the oil we produce, or only have appliances we produce minerals for.
Why does this keep been thrown up as a Condition for renewable energy, while any other resource use get a pass ?
It won't be done at a scale that resembles our current consumptive patterns, no.
It will eventually be done, so long as organised human society exists in some form, but I'm not at all suggesting that 100% of all landfills will be mined for all of their useful materials.
Much of the material will be energetically irrecoverable or just not needed (if you don't have technology that uses indium, you don't need to recover indium from landfills, but iron and steel have so many low-tech uses, etc).
The only viable approach is one that places a financial obligation on enterprises to fully mitigate their environmental impact of mining through:
a) a full environmental mitigation plan being developed and approved before any consent is issued
b) the full payment of a bond to cover the full cost of the environmental mitigation plan before any consent is issued. The interest earned on the bond to be non-taxable and used to cover inflation and cost contingency/optimism bias.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/518697/questions-hang-over-investig…
Should be 'more' questions 'still' hang over....
Take it further and it suggests that government, ie the people should be regulating the market -
1) nothing is produced unless there is a viable end of life facility to recycle, reuse or repurpose...
2) must be able to prove a benefit or improvement to the health and wellbeing of people and planet...
Which suggests that we the people require to be a whole lot more intelligent and wiser than we currently are.
We have not taken up the productivity improvements in this industry so it is still predominantly low wage and far too dangerous for contractors. It is sad that the productivity improvements have not arisen and we have problematic damaging migrant exploitation here too. With other countries employing more productive options they can out compete & improve the industry for everyone's wellbeing. Much like the construction and health sectors keeping the low productivity & low pay is worse all round and especially for worker wellbeing.
That there are multiple environmental lobby groups is a good thing. However none of them are elected by NZers on the electoral role, and none of them take responsibility for mediating different perspectives, even within the environmental lobby sector, let alone the intersecting societal trade-offs.
i think it’s about time, along with those who lobby parliamentarians, that senior lobby group personnel reveal political party affiliations so that we can weight the objectivity of their opinions.
The Greens are constantly been criticized for taking social issues into account, so I don't think the environmental groups taking it up will escape criticism either. Then there is the likes of fair trade, which is 50 50. Environment groups long ago realised the only way to save wildlife in Africa was to raise the standard of the local people, by paying them to help.
But the current coalition paying back it's donors above all else it's a bit hypocritical to insist the environmental groups do better.
If you left the gold in the ground you will have been steamrolled by attacks early on. You see those who play Age of Empires with other people (instead of the AI with super easy to break faults even at highest difficulty) know those who win are those who build up an advanced military early. Using the most resources to increase numbers fast. Then go onto burning other peoples resources. However you still need decent siege weapons or else castles will chew your troops. In ship to ship warfare the most advanced boats have significant advantage but you need teams of them to reduce your losses.
If you knew anything it was not the gold that should have been left it was the meat. There was no such thing as animal replacement so each game every player would lay waste to multiple species instead of using resources & gold to have better farming production. It was easy enough to generate gold when more advanced.
Also if you are using cheat codes the lamborghini shooting lazers were the best for take down. The flying ship was hilarious but the cars were fast and had decent attack.
Let us remember that this is a person touting for their continued income/prestige.
I've seen the same shyte from Otago Uni - when they though there might be offshore oil. I asked the compere if he was 'Prof or pimp?' and he crumbled into a grandfather, worried about his climate legacy. Cognitive dissonance came to mind.
Considering NZ is AOK with slavery, genocide of indigenous minorities, mass environmental destruction and huge amounts of coal & FF burning just so long as it can be left off our books so we look good we will always have a degrading standard of global climate. If we were able to control the means of power, environmental regulations in regards to mining, employee legal protections, the energy use in processing, and manage the logistics it is far better for the global climate overall. However our manufacturing industry has been stripped out and so we would be shipping the materials to other nations. It would still have far more environmental and social benefits for us to do so.
The big thing many people ignore is the means of resource extraction and production also factor into the global climate for their next mobile or tv, or app data center. It is not just the logistics cost that is used in NZ calculations for emissions. We should also consider the overseas mining, production and shipping that we completely ignore. We cannot have lollies and luxuries for nothing. So lets manage the cost to reduce the global impact instead of placing the burden on even less economically stable countries who at the moment experience the worse living & working standards currently on this planet.
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