Rare Earth Minerals: Exposing Hidden Inequities Behind Green Energy

By Amy Khaing ‘27

Rare earth elements (REEs) refer to the seventeen elements that possess distinctive magnetic and electrochemical properties crucial for advanced technologies, particularly those in artificial intelligence and green energy products. Since the Paris Agreement, countries that have agreed to limit global temperature to 1.5°C have sought ways to decarbonize their industries. Most of the renewable energy sources required for this transition, including wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles, and storage batteries, necessitate REEs. In fact, the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that the expansion of the sustainable development industry will increase the demand for REEs sevenfold by 2040. However, although REEs have been crucial to powering green energies, their extraction has inflicted severe environmental damage and human rights abuses in mining regions, especially in developing nations such as China, Myanmar, and Malaysia. The hypocrisy of hiding inequities behind the “green” progress thus underscores an urgent need for a just and ethical transition to sustainability.

As the world’s largest producer of rare earths, China’s decades-long effort to industrially extract the minerals has devastated its own people. According to the BBC, “China has a near monopoly” on REEs, possessing about 70% of the world’s REE mining capacity and 90% of its processing capacity. The majority of these REEs come from Bayan Obo, a mining district with a population of around two million in Inner Mongolia. The industrial mining town contains the largest REE mineral deposit in the world and produced 45% of the world’s REEs alone in 2019. However, decades of operations in Bayan Obo have led to the widespread pollution of local soil and water with heavy metals, such as fluorine and arsenic, which have poisoned “local inhabitants and ecosystems,” per the BBC. In 2010, several villagers were diagnosed with bone and joint deformities caused by contamination resulting from REE, and the New York Times reported in 2017 that children in the nearby city of Baotou still carried harmful levels of rare earth elements in their bodies.

The expansion of Chinese rare earth mining in Southeast Asia has also perpetuated armed violence and human rights abuses. Due to the toxicity of the industry and related human health problems, China has curbed rare earth mining within its borders over the past six years and turned to Myanmar, a neighboring country currently suffering from a decades-long civil war. According to CNBC, in 2024, regions in Northern Myanmar–particularly the Kachin state, a border region–accounted for about 57% of China’s total rare earth imports. Most of the mining has been illegal by international law, as it occurs in collaboration with local armed groups who mine REEs while committing human rights abuses against local inhabitants. The illegally extracted REEs are then exported to “processors in China [and] magnet manufacturers,” who then dispatch the REEs to the global renewable technology supply chain, per Global Witness. Suffering from direct human rights abuses and resultant environmental degradation, communities from Kachin are protesting against illegal REE mining operations that have polluted their territories and livelihoods.

The phenomenon of a developed nation’s exploitatively importing rare earth minerals from a less developed country extends beyond China. Australia’s Lynas Rare Earth Limited, for example, the world’s largest rare earth processing company outside of China, has accumulated over 1.5 million tons of radioactive waste due to its REE processing plants in Malaysia, per reporting by Foreign Policy in Focus. Since 2011, local communities have protested to fight against Lynas’ “unsafe radioactive waste management and disposal methods.” Though the company has tried to justify REE mining by “greenwashing” its mission, per Foreign Policy in Focus, Malaysian campaigns such as “Stop Lynas” have exposed the risks posed by radioactive waste on water availability and long-term cancer risks for the community. Despite repeated protests, Lynas will continue its rare earth processing in the region until 2026.

The development of green energy should not come at the cost of human rights and local environmental destruction. While REEs power technologies for a sustainable future, we need to address the hidden inequities behind their extraction and rethink what “green” energy truly means. Governments need to strengthen international oversight of supply chains, enforce transparency on mining and manufacturing companies, and uphold human rights. We—as consumers–too, should be aware of the ethical complications embedded in the supply chains of the materials that we benefit from every day. Sustainability cannot be measured solely by carbon reductions: only when we address these inequities can we welcome a truly “green” future.