The High-Tech Consumption Conundrum: Driving the Destruction Abroad. Commentary by Oswald J. Schmitz and T. E. Graedel, YaleEnviro360,April 26, 2010. "Our high-tech products increasingly make use of rare metals, and mining those resources can have devastating environmental consequences. But if we block projects like the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska, are we simply forcing mining activity to other parts of the world where protections may be far weaker?... The Pebble Mine deposit would dramatically increase the domestic reserves of copper and gold and would vault the United States into the position of being the world's largest repository of mineable molybdenum... Molybdenum is an irreplaceable constituent of the stainless steels used in surgical instruments, a variety of other medical equipment, and chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing... The confounding situation for the Pebble Mine is that it is situated in the headwaters of Bristol Bay, and the Bristol Bay region is home to five species of salmon that are among the last unthreatened stocks in the Pacific Northwest...
"More than ever, we need to understand how our technological demand for elements from the entire periodic table is linked to the environmental consequences of global extraction. This issue is often overlooked in policy decisions because we fail to appreciate the inextricable connectedness between global locations where technology is manufactured and used and the locations that physically provide the key elements… The Pebble Mine project is merely the latest example, but a particularly clear one, of the global linkages that create ethical and social conundrums. If modern society is to achieve sustainability in a resource-limited world, these are issues that must be explicitly addressed and overcome."
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