Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future

Award-winning journalist Beiser (The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization) brings the issue of critical materials supply into focus by visiting some global hotspots for raw materials. They include brine pools in Chile’s Atacama Desert, electronic-device teardowns in Lagos, Nigeria, and a battery-recycling plant in Kingston, Ontario. Beiser reports also on a guerilla metal salvage from industrial dumpsters in Vancouver, and he investigates a planned ocean-floor mineral-extraction that will use robotic submarines. These resources are meant to help meet energy and technology needs. Aluminum, copper, lithium, nickel, and rare earth elements are essential ingredients, but most people, Beiser says, are unaware of how much of those materials go into electronics. For example, the book notes that it takes 75 pounds of ore to make one iPhone. Beiser argues that digging up and processing ore is brutal on both miners and the environment (and the people who live in surrounding areas), and that trashing or crude disassembly of discarded electronic products is enormously wasteful. He asserts that, in some places, it can also precipitate child labor, robbery, enslavement, and sometimes even murder.