ENVIRONMENTALLY RESPONSIBLE SUPPLIES OF CRITICAL MINERALS: A MULTIDISCIPLINARY APPROACH TO IDENTIFY DATA GAPS AND PRIORITIZE RESEARCH (Invited Presentation)

Critical minerals (CMs) are minerals or elements that are essential to global security and prosperity, with supply chains vulnerable to disruption. An understanding of the environmental behavior and health effects of CMs is needed to ensure the development of a safe and environmentally responsible supply. Yet with 50 commodities on the most recent CM list for the United States (U.S.) and similarly high numbers for other countries, how can they be prioritized for study?

Here we propose a multidisciplinary approach for prioritizing CMs for study, considering not just measures of criticality, but also geochemistry, bioavailability, toxicity, and natural and anthropogenic distribution. This integrated approach is key to a full understanding of the fate, transport, and potential effects of CMs on ecosystem condition and organismal health, as well as the consequences of their increased production and use. This knowledge of environmental behavior may also apply to the identification of alternative CM sources, such as mine wastes, and to the development of methods for enhanced recovery of CMs from those types of unconventional sources. Prioritization of CMs for study requires reasonably easy-to-obtain metrics of environmental behavior. For example, databases such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s ECOTOX database can provide data on toxicity in lieu of full literature searches for every CM (Olker et al., 2022). In this case, the database has a substantial data gap for toxicity of CMs: 29 of the 50 critical commodities have 2 or fewer available toxicity values for acute aquatic exposure. Such databases do not include 100% of published toxicity data and require updating to remain current; however, they are useful first filters to identify CMs with scarce data and/or the potential for high toxicity. By developing reasonably easy-to-obtain metrics for the other prioritization criteria listed above, researchers can focus on those CMs that are most critical, mobile in the environment, bioavailable, toxic, or simply lacking data for these criteria. Such an understanding of data availability is necessary to prioritize timely research to meet global demands for sustainable and environmentally responsible supplies of CMs.

Olker, J.H., et al., 2022. Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, 41(6), pp.1520-1539.