No matter where you are, or what device you’re watching this on— it’s because of minerals.

Subterranean specks from all over the world power our lives in invisible ways. They’re in our buildings, our tech, our food packaging, and our toothpaste.

Without them, there’d be no solar batteries, no wind turbines, no electric cars. Today, our modern society depends on a wider variety of minerals, at a larger scale, than ever before. But… what does that mean for our future?

Hi! I’m Sage, and this is Crash Course Geology. [THEME MUSIC] Earlier in this series, we  learned the basics of minerals: solid crystals with specific chemical compositions, formed by geological processes. We humans have been innovating with them for thousands of years, all the way back to painting on cave walls with hematite, and later making tools out of bronze and iron.

And today, minerals are behind nearly every gadget and gizmo in our tech-fueled world. Take your phone, for example. There are about 42 different minerals in the average smartphone alone!

Quartz sand and sphalerite are used to make its screen, and bauxite helps it light up. There’s silicon from quartz in its circuits, wolframite and bastnaesite to make it vibrate, lithium in its batteries, sourced from spodumene… I could go on. But how do we get all those minerals that our societies are literally built on?

Well, it’s complicated. Mining, or the extraction of minerals from the earth, can be done in four main ways. Some mining happens underground, through tunnels and shafts dug deep in the earth.

Other times, minerals are extracted through surface mining, where open pits or strips are carved into the land. Both of these methods are used to dig up the copper found in your smartphone’s circuitry. There’s also in-situ mining, where a chemical solution gets injected into the ground to dissolve particular minerals, so they can be pumped to the surface.

And lastly, there’s placer mining, which takes minerals from the sediment of stream beds. It’s a common method for extracting gold, which your phone has tiny amounts of in its circuits. And extraction is just the first step of mining.

To get usable, purified minerals, what’s taken from the earth has to be processed and refined. It takes a huge amount of moving and processing rocks and dirt to get even a small amount of what we’re after. For just one ton of copper, we have to extract and process up to 200 tons of ore, the solid material it’s found in.

And to get just one ton of cobalt to make batteries, we have to dig up roughly 1500 tons of ore. A real needle in a haystack situation. All of that digging, processing and refining… just to get this.

Now, here’s the not-so-fun part. While mining provides us with the materials for our modern lives, it also wreaks havoc on the environment. Both underground and surface mining drastically change the landscape, and can release toxic contaminants if not done carefully.

In-situ mining disturbs the surface of the land much less than carving into it. But it still risks contaminating the groundwater— which supplies drinking water for over 2 billion people. And even placer mining risks disrupting ecosystems and polluting the soil and water.

Not to mention, processing and refining can rev up erosion and contaminate the air, soil, and waterways. All these effects can threaten the homes and health of people living nearby, including the workers actually doing the mining. About 15,000 miners are killed on the job every year.

And there are even more complications to consider. Today’s technologies rely on a wider variety of minerals, in larger amounts, than ever before in human history. That’s especially true as we ramp up renewable energy technologies that’ll help us break up with fossil fuels and slow down climate change.

But as demand for these technologies grows, so does demand for the minerals that build and power them, like copper, nickel, chromium, zinc, and cobalt. These are examples of critical minerals— resources that are in high demand, but are hard to get. Some of these minerals are rarely found on Earth.

Others are hard to get because of tricky political dynamics between the countries that have them and the countries that want them. One country’s list of “critical” minerals might be different from another’s, depending on the resources they’ve got and the ones they need to import. Still other minerals are called “critical” because they’re just so dang hard to extract from the ground, like rare earth elements: metals in the middle of the periodic table.

Take the critical mineral lithium. For decades, it’s been a mood-stabilizing ingredient in some antidepressants. We also use it in the batteries that power electric cars and store solar and wind energy— all of which we’re using more and more all the time.

Which is great! The faster we break up with fossil fuels, the better! But also, the more we need a steady supply of lithium.

If we were to achieve net-zero global carbon emissions by 2040, lithium demand would be forty times higher than it was in 2020. That’s a lot of lithium. Even though lithium isn’t exactly rare worldwide, most of it comes from just a few countries, and it has to travel through multiple links on a global supply chain before it’s actually in use.

Like, it’s common for lithium mined in Australia to be refined in China, before it’s manufactured into a battery in California. Even one weak link in that supply chain can disrupt the whole thing. The situation is a real catch-22.

We need minerals to power modern life, but their extraction causes damage and, in many cases, there aren’t enough to go around. So, the question becomes: can we get these resources responsibly and sustainably? Dwayne, what do you think? “Reply hazy, try again?!” Oh, come on!

Luckily, geologists have ideas. One is to design technologies that use less of these minerals in the first place. Basically, make stuff that’s more mineral-efficient.

Which we’ve done before! The amount of silver used in the cells that make  up solar panels dropped  eighty percent in a decade, and electric vehicle batteries use way less cobalt today than they used to. When it comes to other electronic devices, like phones and computers, planned obsolescence is a major problem.

That’s a strategy manufacturers use to give their products shorter lifespans so that consumers have to buy new ones. Instead, tech companies can commit to “green design.” That means developing products with recycling and repair in mind, so that devices last longer and are easier to recycle. Or, just like how appliances have efficiency standards, governments can introduce standards that require “mineral efficiency.” And recycling is a big part of the equation.

E-waste— or, electronic equipment that’s been discarded— makes up a huge amount of global waste: 62 million metric tons in 2022 alone. That’s about eleven times as heavy as the Great Pyramid of Giza. A third of that waste is small electronic devices, like toys, microwaves, vacuums, and vapes.

And less than a quarter was properly recycled. “Properly” being the key word. Historically, e-waste recycling, also known as urban mining, has been a huge mess of ecological and ethical issues. Most e-waste is generated by high-income countries, who ship it off to lower-income countries for recycling and disposal, with little regulation.

And a lot of times, that means workers— including children— manually breaking apart electronics, which exposes them and their environments to harmful chemicals and substances. So e-waste recycling needs to be ethical and sustainable to have a truly positive impact. A 2024 report from the United Nations found that “Just 1% of rare earth element demand is met by e-waste recycling." We could get so much more out of urban mining if we had the proper infrastructure.

And we’re already seeing some of this in action. There’s a growing trend of e-waste getting sent back to high-income countries that have the resources for sustainable recycling. Several countries, like Croatia, South Korea, and India, have been rolling out programs that require the companies that make electronics to handle the e-waste they generate.

And as of 2012, the European Union requires all its members to provide a free e-waste recycling system. It’s called the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive, AKA the WEEE Directive! As for what we can do?

For starters, we can properly recycle old phones, laptops, tablets, and chargers at electronic recycling centers in our area instead of throwing them away. Or better yet, repair and use them as long as possible, only swapping for the Next Big Thing when you really need to. My phone right here is a used and refurbished one!

We can also put pressure on tech companies to take on more environmental responsibility, and on governments to regulate e-waste production and disposal. These approaches— better regulation, more  corporate responsibility,  recycling what’s possible— can be applied to many different minerals we need, from lithium to aluminum. One day, we could have a “circular economy,” where old, discarded stuff feeds directly into making new stuff.

Like, scientists from the Critical Materials Institute at Ames National Laboratory in Iowa have developed an environmentally-friendly  way of recovering rare earth  metals from old hard drives. Those metals could then be used in new hard-drives used in data centers across the world. Data centers are actually what “the cloud” is, if you can believe it.

When it comes down to it, these big, complex problems require big, complex solutions. Whatever the paths forward, they’ll require collaboration from all kinds of people. And geologists will be a part of that!

They’re researching how lithium deposits form and how to mine them more safely. They’re scoping out untapped sources of critical minerals. And they’re testing more sustainable ways of extracting them.

Maybe someday you’ll be a part of that work yourself— and come up with questions no one has thought to ask yet. We humans have depended on minerals for thousands of years— and that’s not slowing down anytime soon. Modern life is literally built on tiny, precious pieces of Earth.

Now, the challenge is figuring out how to mine and use these materials more responsibly, so our future can be built on them, too. Next time, we’ll learn what Earth’s hottest period can tell us about today’s climate crisis. See you then.

Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Geology which was filmed at our studio in Indianapolis, Indiana, and was made with the help of all these nice people. If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone, forever, you can join our community on Patreon.