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submitted 8 hours ago by Tango@piefed.ca to c/world@lemmy.world

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.

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[-] frongt@lemmy.zip 6 points 6 hours ago

Raise your hand if you think it'll be good for the local environment or workers

[-] Tiral@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

Obviously not.

Gonna be like China and destroy their environment, between lithium and "rare earth mineral" mining.

[-] Tango@piefed.ca 16 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

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.

[-] NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io 4 points 5 hours ago

I mean, sure, here's mine. Exporting raw minerals is basically the worst thing a country can do for its workers and environment.

this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
69 points (98.6% liked)

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