Just published in the journal Minerals
The paper published is entitled:
"Sustainable Production of Rare Earth Elements from Mine Waste and Geoethics"
and authored by Marouen Jouini, Alexandre Royer-Lavallée, Thomas Pabst, Eunhyea Chung, Rina Kim, Young-Wook Cheong and Carmen Mihaela Neculita
This paper is fully open access and can be downloaded here:
https://www.geoethics.org/_files/ugd/5195a5_e500f62ca2cd49789df147509e801964.pdf?index=trueAbstract:
The vulnerability of the rare earth element (REE) supply in a global context of increasing demands entails important economic and political issues, and has encouraged several countries to develop their own REE production projects. This study comparatively evaluated the production of REEs from primary and secondary resources in terms of their sustainability and contribution to the achievement of the Geoethics concept as responsibility towards oneself, colleagues, society, and the Earth system. Twelve categories of potential environmental and social impacts were selected: human health toxicity, global warming or climate change, terrestrial and aquatic eutrophication, acidification potential, particulate matter, resource depletion, water consumption, fresh water ecotoxicity, ionizing radiation, fossil fuel consumption, and ozone depletion. The results showed that the environmental impact of REE production from secondary sources is much lower relative to primary sources. A comparison of conventional and non-conventional REE resources showed that significant impact categories were related to particulate matter formation, abiotic resource depletion, and fossil fuel depletion, which could result from avoiding the tailings disposal before reuse. Based on these findings, governments and stakeholders should be encouraged to increase the recycling of secondary REE sources with Geoethics in mind, in order to balance the high demand of REEs while minimizing the overexploitation of non-renewable resources.
This paper can be cited as follows:
Jouini M., Royer-Lavallée A., Pabst T., Chung E., Kim R., Cheong Y.-W. and Neculita C.M. (2022). Sustainable Production of Rare Earth Elements from Mine Waste and Geoethics. Minerals, 12(7), 809. https://doi.org/10.3390/min12070809.
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Other publications on geoethics in the IAPG website:
IAPG - International Association for Promoting Geoethics:
https://www.geoethics.org
IAPG - International Association for Promoting Geoethics:
https://www.geoethics.org
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