EU transition to a world of solar panels, electric cars and wind turbines requires critical raw materials. However, mining and processing these materials is a dirty business that can negatively affect human health, Voxeurop reports.
Anton (that’s not his real name) was happy when, in 2020, he got a job as an operator at SK Innovations’ (SKI) car battery factory in Komárom, Hungary. He said:
“I was happy because the money was good, especially for that region.”
The gigafactory had just opened, and at the height of the COVID pandemic, there was little work. However, six months later, Anton left the company after a urine test showed that the level of nickel in his body was three times higher than the permissible limits. Nickel accumulation has been linked to pulmonary fibrosis, kidney and cardiovascular diseases, and respiratory cancer. There is also a high incidence of nasal and lung cancer among workers exposed to the material. Anton explained:
“I have kids and I want to raise those kids.”
As the continent ramps up production of critical raw materials (CRMs) in the face of a near existential climate crisis, Anton’s experience could soon be replicated by many workers across Europe. CRMs such as lithium, nickel, cobalt and graphite are crucial to the clean energy technologies needed to avert climate collapse – from wind turbines to electric car batteries. However, their supply chains are currently limited and shortages are predicted over the next decade.
As a result, new EU legislation in the form of the Critical Raw Materials Act proposes that by 2030, 10 per cent of Europe’s CO production, 40 per cent of its processing and 15 per cent of its recycling should be done domestically – to reduce dependence on third countries, many of which have poor human rights and environmental records, according to Voxeurop.
Hungary will benefit the most. By 2031, it will be the second largest producer of car batteries and the single largest producer of “tier 1” batteries that can be used in Europe, according to market analyst Benchmark Mineral Intelligence (BMI). BMI said this was partly because Hungary has cheaper labour and land costs than Western Europe.
Meanwhile, the health costs of the electric car revolution have yet to be calculated. According to the European Environment Agency, Europe accounts for 23% of all new cancer cases worldwide, even though its population is only 6%, partly due to “chronic exposure to certain pharmaceuticals, pollutants and other occupational and environmental carcinogens.” Yet according to recent reports, under pressure from industry, the European Commission appears to be backing away from plans to ban dangerous chemicals. Plans for stricter regulation of substances such as lithium may be next under consideration.
Moreover, according to BMI, the Hungarian government has given SKI a €209 million subsidy to build another battery factory in Iváncsa. 300 workers who were denied safety equipment went on strike in June 2023 after an outbreak of vomiting, diarrhoea and rashes. According to other reports, the issue of unpaid wages was the deciding factor. Many unions argue that illnesses caused by CO cocktails with chemicals are not always identified and that the lack of regulatory oversight exacerbates the problem, Voxeurop reports.
The crucial raw materials Anton worked with – nickel, cobalt and manganese – accumulated in a “thick layer of dust” that blew all over the plant. He noted:
“Everyone in the plant knew that there was a dust problem because they had to clean it all the time and use vacuum cleaners on the electronic devices. But we were only given Covid medical masks and rubber gloves for protection. I knew someone whose nickel levels were five times higher than normal, but in the Hungarian system – which is corrupt – no one cares about a few dead workers. The whole system is structured in favour of these companies.”
Glen Mpufane, the mining director for the IndustriAll Global Union, said:
“No occupational exposure limit for lithium has been established, beyond existing safe work practices. The same goes for cobalt and it may well be that, given the latent exposure of workers to their toxicity and cancer risks, somewhere down the line, workers will face the consequences, as they did with silicosis and black lung cancer in coal mines.”
In Hungary, where unions expect employment in the CRM sector to rocket from around 7,000 now to as many as 40,000 within a decade, the setup has been exacerbated by a lack of regulatory enforcement. Unions say that it would take 160 years for the current health and safety inspectorate to visit every company. Balazs Babel, the vice president of Hungary’s metalworkers union Vasas says:
“We need better protection for workers. That’s for sure. This is a very, very dangerous field of work. Where there is a suspicion of exposure to dangerous materials, then workers should be provided with ventilation and all the protective gear they need.”
Anton says that during SKI’s safety training in Komárom, he asked the company’s health and safety representative about the safety of one of the chemicals he was working with: N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone (NMP). He remembers:
“They said: It’s not dangerous at all. You can even drink it and you wouldn’t have any problem.”
However, NMP, which is suspected of reprotoxicity, was placed on the EU’s list of banned substances two years earlier. SKI did not respond to a request for comment.
The development of a domestic CRM industry in Europe will not be limited to Hungary. According to the International Energy Agency, demand for cobalt and neodymium could rise by 150 per cent, copper and nickel by 50-70 per cent and graphite and lithium by 600-700 per cent if the world is to reach the net zero target by 2050. Germany is expected to become the largest producer of electric batteries in Europe, followed by Hungary, Poland, France and Sweden, according to Voxeurop.
Peter Froven, a spokesman for Swedish trade union IF Metall, said that although gigafactories in his country currently employ only a few thousand people, they are “growing like mushrooms” and could increase their workforce tenfold by 2030. He added:
“We have fears that they’re building so fast that they’re basically burning out the workforce. I mean, you’ve got production one day, you’re stopping the next, and you’re also learning how to do the new processes safely while you’re doing it. Building a battery requires the cleanest area you can find. It has to be completely dust-free. And if you’re simultaneously constructing the building around this area, then of course you’ll have problems with missed deadlines because there’s leakage of dust into the batteries. There’s also a very fast pace, which means mistakes are easier to make. We’ve had chemical leaks, quite bad cuts, chemical skin burns, things like that. After workers at one plant were sprayed with chemical slurry used to fill up batteries, IF Metall faced the inevitable problem of trying to identify which substances had been in it. It’s like the Coca Cola recipe.”
Sophie Grenade, adviser to IndustriAll, said:
“Mining remains one of the world’s most hazardous occupations. This is one of the industries with the most extreme accidents, lots of chronic disease, and illness. These things still happen in Europe.”
Such incidents have led to calls for the European Commission to tighten supervision of substances used in the CRM sector. Exposure limits for workers to hazardous materials are set at EU level and transposed by member states, but enforcement at national level often leaves much to be desired.
Sophie Grenade, IndustriAll advisor, says social partner agreements such as Nepsi – an agreement negotiated between trade unions and employers to tackle silica exposure – are helping to improve the situation on the ground. Partly funded by the EU, Nepsi is considered a complement to mandatory exposure limits in the workplace.
But campaigners such as Friend of the Earth Europe argue that the industry, which spends €21 million a year lobbying in Europe and has held an average of two meetings a week with EU politicians since 2014, is creating its own gravitas by reducing legal protections for both workers and the public, Voxeurop reports.
The European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) has recommended that lithium be classified as “reprotoxic”, obliging stronger protection for workers. But it remains to be seen whether the Commission will decide to overturn this recommendation in the name of the safe and profitable introduction of electric vehicles. The Commission has asked ECHA to launch another public consultation on the issue and gives no information on the timing and grounds it may use to overturn ECHA’s decision.
Responding to a request for comment, an EU official who declined to be identified told HesaMag:
“The Commission is committed to better protect[ing] human health and the environment, as part of an ambitious approach to tackle pollution from all sources and move to a toxic-free environment. In this sense, the Critical Raw Materials Act takes these concerns very seriously and puts in place a framework that will ensure that such environmental concerns are well assessed.”
Other substances such as nickel and cobalt have been labelled by ECHA as suspected reprotoxins and carcinogens, but as Vasas vice president Babel puts it:
“It’s not enough that we have laws, we need enforcement of these laws.” This is reaffirmed by IndustriAll’s Grenade: ‘We need regulation and strong standards that are absolutely binding and not just “narrative”’.
It’s not just about new battery plants. The European CRM Act would speed up the permitting process for mining, processing, cleaning and disposing of infrastructure that could be classified as “priority public interest” under the proposed legislation. Environmentalists often point out that the health damage from coal mining is an order of magnitude greater than that from substances such as lithium, but there is a caveat: there is a huge difference between the scale of these sectors and the data available on them.
Europe has considerable reserves of CO, albeit much smaller than coal. While coal reserves on the continent are estimated at 79 billion metric tonnes, cobalt reserves are only 1.3 million tonnes, mostly in the Balkans and Turkey, and lithium reserves are about 7% of the 98 million tonnes of global reserves in countries such as Portugal, the Czech Republic and Germany. The continent also has significant graphite deposits in Scandinavia, and 243,000 tonnes of nickel were mined in 2021.
These resources can be extracted in a variety of ways. For example, lithium can be extracted from open-pit mines or pumped out of underground geothermal reservoirs as a salty liquid that must be treated to remove the lithium. Sophie Grenade notes that whether mining coal, nickel or some other material, despite industry’s best efforts, mining “remains one of the most dangerous occupations in the world. It’s one of the industries with the most accidents, a lot of chronic illness and disease. All of this is still happening in Europe.
Lithium and cobalt mining can cause problems. If we talk about sustainable mining or responsible use of raw materials, lithium is very corrosive, so there is a risk of explosions. Cobalt is reprotoxic and can cause cancer, so we absolutely need strong safeguards for workers, collective rights and occupational exposure limits in line with scientific evidence.” Grenade wants these provisions spelt out in the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act so that “the clean technology race does not lead to deregulation.”
If community and worker dissent is ignored, the results could be explosive. A €2.2 billion lithium mine in Serbia planned by Rio Tinto was cancelled in 2022 after massive protests by local residents concerned about environmental and water pollution, despite the mine reportedly being able to supply 90% of Europe’s lithium needs. Public demonstrations in Portugal, including a new protest camp launched in August 2023 against the construction of Europe’s largest open-pit lithium mine in Boticas, highlight the obstacles facing any expansion of the European CRM industry, according to Voxeurop.
According to Cecilia Mattea, the batteries and supply chain policy manager for Transport and Environment, a campaigning NGO and think tank, the EU’s mining laws are inadequate and in need of reform:
“The EU’s mining laws are so outdated that in Spain for example, mine tailing is allowed to sit much closer to the local community than in China or Brazil. It’s simply not acceptable. We should review the EU’s mining laws.”
Some politicians fear that even raising these kinds of issues could spark a backlash against electric cars, which, after all, are fuelled by the renewable energy the planet needs to avoid catastrophe. But unions counter that ignoring the needs of workers sets the stage for a backlash, leaving communities with a sense of grievance that can be manipulated. Asked whether workers support the transition to clean energy, Babel answers frankly: “I’m not sure workers care that much.” Left Party MEP Marc Botenga said:
“Every time you attack workers rights, support for the Green Deal in particular – and climate policies in general – goes down. Where workers have real health and safety concerns and communities have real concerns about their drinking water it will obviously and very clearly weaken support for climate policies.”
His colleague, the Left Party MEP Cornelia Ernst, adds:
“The Green Deal needs social majorities and these come about when people’s living and working conditions improve. A green deal without the workers is not possible.”
