11.3 Business Operations and Environmental Effects

Before moving on, it will be helpful to have a clearer picture of how business operations can affect the environment. We sometimes have a tendency to see this issue only in terms of climate change, and while rising global temperatures are a major ethical issue, they are far from the only one.

Let’s consider first the issue of resource extraction and depletion. In many cases, extracting natural resources from the environment is a difficult and expensive process, requiring lots of time and sophisticated equipment. And many of the resources are not located within the countries that carry out the extraction processes. For example, removing rare earth elements and metals, such as lanthanum, erbium, and ytterbium, from the earth’s outer surface is an arduous process. Despite the name, these elements and minerals are not actually “rare”; they are in fact abundant, but because they are almost always found mixed with other materials, they must be separated from those materials first before they can be used. The two primary methods for mining and purifying these elements are: removing topsoil by pit mining, or drill mining and then adding chemicals to the drilled holes. Both methods produce a great deal of waste: according to some estimates, to obtain one ton of rare earth elements, the extraction processes produces more than ten kilograms of dust, around 10,000 cubic meters of waste gas, almost 100 cubic meters of wastewater, and one ton of radioactive residue. In addition, these processes usually leave behind “leaching ponds,” or small bodies of poisoned water and chemicals involved in extracting and isolating the elements.

Many industries, including and most of all the technology industry, use rare earth elements in their products. But how much environmental damage is too much? How much harmful byproducts can we tolerate before what we extract is no longer worth the extraction process? This is one of the most pressing ethical questions in some industries.

Another important ethical issue concerns who owns the rare earth elements in the first place. China is the world’s most prolific extractor of these elements, accounting for the production of around 90% of the world’s supply starting in the late 1980’s. But China is only home to about 35% of the world’s reserves of these elements, meaning that the greater part of their extraction occurs outside Chinese borders. The country has negotiated aggressively to establish itself as the sole producer of these elements in many places across the globe: in 2007, in a deal with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), China would receive exclusive mining rights for cobalt and copper and in exchange it would contribute to infrastructure projects across the DRC. In 2019 it signed a similar deal for mining rights in Kenya.