Zimbabwe’s first plant to process clean-energy metal lithium – of which it is Africa’s top producer – is up and running, a milestone in its expanding drive to stop the wholesale export of its raw mineral wealth.
Zimbabwe’s first plant to process clean-energy metal lithium – of which it is Africa’s top producer – is up and running, a milestone in its expanding drive to stop the wholesale export of its raw mineral wealth.
Zimbabwe was already mining the lithium, so the environmental damage was already happening. What’s new here is that it’s now processing it locally. This means Zimbabwe gets a bigger percentage of the money that’s made from this lithium. A nation’s resources should be profitable primarily to itself.
Additionally, exporting for processing is more environmentally damaging than doing it locally because when you export, then in addition to whatever damage is done by processing, you also get all the environmental damage that comes from all that transportation. Eliminating the transportation at least removes one unnecessary element of environmental damage in an industrial chain that would exist one way or the other.