As the world shifts to clean energy, Africa’s minerals are in demand. But can we mine without repeating the same mistakes?
If you’re reading this story on your smartphone, it might interest you to know that the device in your hand contains at least 13 minerals or metals, and roughly 75 elements from the periodic table. Most of these are non-recyclable, not because they can’t be reused, but because it’s still cheaper to dig new holes than to recover what already exists. An iPhone 15 Pro, for instance, contains cobalt, copper and lithium, much of which was likely mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Zimbabwe and other precarious jurisdictions.
We tend not to ask too many questions about where these minerals come from, or the conditions under which they were extracted. A bit like buying eggs, we rarely consider the humaneness of the conditions under which that laying hen was kept. Many producers and consumers turn a blind eye to the murky realities that underpin modern supply chains. We seem willing to ignore the sacrifices of child labour or militia-run mines on the altar of convenience. I’m not saying you shouldn’t buy an iPhone, but we probably should be more aware of where our possessions come from.
Either way, the point is this: mining is integral to our day-to-day existence. Drones used in modern warfare – a Hermes 450-type, for instance – contain at least 11 minerals or metals. Many overlap with those used in smartphones, electric vehicles (EVs), solar panels or wind turbines. A single utility-scale solar farm uses tonnes of silver and millions of tonnes of aluminium across its lifecycle. A three-megawatt wind turbine can require up to 600 kg of rare earths and 5,000 kg of copper.
EVs are hardly born green either. The minerals needed to build one – lithium from Chile or Zimbabwe, cobalt from Congo, nickel from Indonesia, graphite from China – must be mined, smelted, shipped and assembled through carbon-intensive global supply chains. Manufacturing an EV can emit up to 80% more carbon upfront than building a petrol-fuelled car, primarily because of the battery. It only becomes the cleaner option after 20,000 to 30,000 km of driving, and longer still in countries like South Africa, whose electricity is coal-intensive. The extent to which they become clean depends on how they’re charged, how far they’re driven, and how responsibly their minerals are sourced.
To power a lower-carbon future, the world must scale up the mining of “transition minerals”, ie, the mineral building blocks for solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, EVs, and grid storage technologies. Meeting the 1.5 °C target under the Paris Agreement – a goal now under pressure from political backsliding in major economies – will require a staggering increase in material extraction. According to the International Energy Agency, lithium demand could rise by 4,000% by 2040; Cobalt by 2,000%; Nickel and graphite by more than 1,900%. We’ll need to mine more copper in the next 25 years than in all of human history thus far.
This extraction will not be a clean process. Every new mine brings its own set of negative externalities: disrupted ecosystems, depleted water supplies, untreated toxic tailings and displaced communities. These costs are most often offloaded onto those least able to resist or afford them – indigenous groups, rural populations, workers in weakly regulated settings. And much of this future mining will happen here in Africa. African countries, with rich reserves of cobalt, copper, tin, titanium, tantalum, lithium, manganese, rare earths and platinum group metals, are at the centre of this demand surge.
The risk is not only a story of externalities improperly accounted for; it’s history repeating itself. If we keep exporting raw ores and importing finished technologies, we’ll fall back into the same low-value, high-bulk commodity trap that has defined Africa’s role in the global economy for decades. We’ll fuel global industry while capturing only a fraction of the wealth and absorbing a disproportionate share of the damage. In a context of democratic backsliding, the stakes are higher still. Resource rents allow autocrats to sidestep the hard work of building a broad tax base. Dictators typically find it cheaper to repress citizens than to reform institutions in favour of them.
Even so, the growing demand for transition minerals also presents the possibility of a better model. New technologies can also be adopted to change the way we mine – they promise to extract more, waste less, and reduce mining’s environmental footprint. Innovations like precision drilling, autonomous haulage, machine learning for ore targeting, and remote-operated processing plants are already changing the dynamics of extraction. Sensor-based ore sorting and in-situ leaching allow for more selective mining. Bio-leaching techniques, using microbes to extract metals like copper and gold, are showing early promise in reducing the toxic chemicals and energy usually associated with conventional processes.
These lower-impact methods are mostly found in well-capitalised mining jurisdictions – Australia, Canada, Chile – where regulation is strong and investment in automation is high. But the shift comes with a cost: fewer direct mining jobs. This is both good and bad. Mining work is dangerous and often leads to long-term health problems. But it’s also one of few sources of income in many rural African regions. According to the World Bank, automation could eliminate up to 40% of traditional mining jobs in developing countries over the next two decades. A cleaner mine may be a less labour-intensive one. That’s a hard trade-off in economies where jobs remain the primary route to dignity and stability.
And not all so-called “clean” mining is clean. Deep-sea mining is increasingly pitched as a lower-impact alternative to land-based extraction, but it risks devastating marine ecosystems we barely understand. Some lithium brine operations in South America have drained local water supplies and left soils permanently damaged, despite using less physical infrastructure than traditional mines. Even in the most advanced jurisdictions, tailings dams, acid mine drainage, and airborne dust remain ongoing risks.
The bottom line is that technology alone won’t guarantee justice. If African communities are to benefit from the shift towards lower-impact mining, then new models of ownership, employment and beneficiation need to emerge. That might mean community-owned processing cooperatives, shared equity arrangements, or local technology licensing. Without this, green mining may simply become another high-tech frontier for external profit extraction – cleaner pits, yes, but still empty pockets.
One alternative is a shift towards what economist Kate Raworth calls Doughnut Economics, a framework that aims to meet human needs without overshooting ecological limits. In practical terms, this means building economic systems that are both regenerative and distributive. Circular economy thinking – reuse, recycling, reprocessing and value-retention – offers a pathway to that.
We’re already seeing early signs of this across the continent. In South Africa, some mine tailings are being repurposed into construction materials. In Ghana, e-waste is being recovered for copper and rare earths. In Zambia and the DRC, early discussions are underway on battery dismantling and component recovery, opening the possibility that these countries will not just export raw materials but also begin to participate in the recycling economy.
At a community level, this could mean building local recycling hubs, supporting artisanal refiners with cleaner tech, or training youth in e-waste disassembly and remanufacturing. Mining towns could become centres of circular innovation, closing material loops and keeping more value, and more decision-making power, closer to home.
The challenge is scale. Most African countries still lack the infrastructure, investment and policy alignment to make these models work. But if circular principles are embedded now – in industrial policy, urban planning, and trade strategy – then this transition could finally deliver what earlier mining booms did not: a pathway to shared prosperity, within the planet’s limits.
So, let’s return to that iPhone in your hand. Right now, it’s easier and cheaper to mine new lithium and cobalt than it is to recover the materials from the last device you discarded. Less than 20% of e-waste is properly recycled globally. The rest ends up in landfills, incinerators, or informal scrapyards, often in countries that mined the minerals in the first place. This is both a missed opportunity and a warning.
If we took product design and end-of-life recovery seriously – if phones were built to be disassembled, components remanufactured, and metals recovered – we could begin to model a different kind of economy in which value loops, rather than leaks.
The iPhone, then, is more than just a consumer object. It’s a case study in what’s broken – and what could be fixed. If we want mining to tell a new story, we need more than cleaner pits. We need smarter systems, and we need to close the loops.
Dr Ross Harvey is a natural resource economist and policy analyst, and he has been dealing with governance issues in various forms across this sector since 2007. He has a PhD in economics from the University of Cape Town, and his thesis research focused on the political economy of oil and institutional development in Angola and Nigeria. While completing his PhD, Ross worked as a senior researcher on extractive industries and wildlife governance at the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA), and in May 2019 became an independent conservation consultant. Ross’s task at GGA is to establish a non-renewable natural resources project (extractive industries) to ensure that the industry becomes genuinely sustainable and contributes to Africa achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Ross was appointed Director of Research and Programmes at GGA in May 2020.
