China’s Power and the Planet’s Pain: The Challenge of the Rare Earth Supply Earth.Org Sangeeta Jayadevan Global Commons Oct 6th 2025 The world runs on rare earth elements (REEs), a set of 17 metals indispensable for everything from EV batteries and wind turbines to your smartphone. While critical for the global green transition, their mining and processing are dominated by China and come at a steep price: massive environmental damage, toxic waste, and radioactive residues. With global demand expected to skyrocket by 2040, the urgent challenge is to ramp up recycling. Rare earth elements (REEs), a set of 17 elements, have acquired critical importance in recent years. They possess powerful magnetic and luminescent properties, making them critical for renewable energy infrastructure, electric vehicles, defense and tech devices like cellphones. While not exactly rare, they are present generally as trace impurities, bound closely with other similar elements. Their extraction and separation is costly and difficult since they are rarely present in concentrated deposits. Huge amounts of ores need to be excavated to yield a small amount of REEs, and multiple processing cycles and tests are needed to isolate them. Their extraction processes often involve toxic chemicals that can contaminate air, water, and soil, leading to significant environmental pollution. Mining of these elements can produce radioactive waste, posing health risks to nearby communities and ecosystems. Mining and processing one ton of REEs typically generates thousands of tons of waste material, including mine tailings, acidic wastewater, and radioactive processing residues.
Importance of Rare Earth Elements........REEs are often referred to as the invisible building blocks of modern society due to their breadth of uses in renewables and high-tech areas. No viable alternatives pose potential for disruption in global supply. In 2022, researchers estimated that demand for REEs is expected to increase by a factor of seven by 2040, as the global transition to renewable energy accelerates. The largest REE mines in production are found in China, which accounts for 60% of global production and about 85-90% of global REE processing. The US, Myanmar, Australia, Nigeria and Thailand also have large mines. China’s dominance was achieved through decades of state investment, subsidies, cheap labour, and significantly lower regulatory and environmental standards. Intense internal competition, innovation and R&D spending has further helped the country position itself far ahead of other countries, and manage to process REEs at a fraction of the cost. This has forced other companies out of business for the processing part of the supply-chain. China has at times placed barriers to exports of technologies for processing rare earths in response to geo-political tensions.
How Can Supply Be Augmented? Strategic partnerships exist between the US, Australia, Canada, Myanmar, Pakistan, Ukraine, India, and the EU to accelerate investment in reserves and processing capabilities........read on https://earth.org/chinas-power-and-the-planets-pain-the-challenge-of-the-rare-earth-supply/