Miners get tin trouble
Overlooked in the energy transition, tin reaches to new heights, and miners reach to new depths
Climate technologies require enormous amounts of metal. I’m Ian Morse, and this is Green Rocks, a newsletter that doesn’t want dirty mining to ruin clean energy.
Tin has been called the “forgotten foot soldier of the energy transition”. When most people think about the metals needed for climate technologies, they think lithium or copper or cobalt or nickel. However, tin is used in just about everything that has a circuit board. When the response to climate crisis is to electrify energy consumption, that entails a lot of tin.
People who produce tin understand its worth. The price for tin this year has leapt more than 50% — more than the jumps for headline-grabbing copper and lithium. These kinds of jolts are indications that current supply may need to grow to meet demand.
Maryono has witnessed how miners have responded to rising demand. He’s a 49-year-old community leader in the Bangka-Belitung archipelago in Indonesia. According to recent estimates, his country provides a quarter of the world’s tin, and it’s the largest exporter of the metal. The Bangka-Belitung islands produce 90% of Indonesia’s tin, so there’s a high chance you’re reading this with a circuit board made with material from his islands.
That’s a lot to ask of islands the size of Massachusetts. As reserves on land shrink, companies seek out the tin buried in the seafloor. Officials have turned areas assigned for fishing into mining zones. Large state-owned ships and smaller, locally owned pontoons spread across the coastlines. Black smoke rises from diesel-fueled pumps onboard, and dirt sucked up from below is dispersed throughout fisheries. When these boats group together, they look eerily similar to the landscape in Kevin Costner’s 1995 film Waterworld.
“Officials say the communities here rely on mining for income and development. But we’re fishers and farmers!” Maryono told me.
The first boom in mining tin from Bangka-Belitung coincided with an explosion on consumer electronics that required fine-tuned circuitry. As the energy transition kicks off, there’s an opportunity to move forward with a greater understanding of the impacts of mining. If tin mining is to meet demand, consumers and companies will have to confront social and environmental risks in one of the most concentrated metal markets.
For several years, fishers have protested the activities of tin mining. They’ve boarded some ships and started fights, sometimes receiving jail time as a result. Some companies have permits and concession areas, but many are suspected to be illegal. On these boats, which are typically smaller and have employed children, people sift through dirt and rely on divers who spend long periods of time in deep pits below the surface. With few safety regulations, workers have often died on the job. Mining the metal on land had increased levels of metal contamination in water.
A decade ago, these issues catapulted Bangka-Belitung into headlines from the BBC, The Guardian and others. These stories traced metals from working children in Bangka to iPhones and other devices. Apple said it was “deeply offended” at the accusation from the BBC.
Extraction reached such depths that locals have said the island is at risk of sinking in some places. Many of the mines have not been rehabilitated. In the photo below, the white patches on land are current and former tin mines that shape the landscape into something resembling our moon. (While I haven’t been to the moon, I’ve included a photo from a 2018 trip to Bangka at the end of the newsletter.)
Maryono lives in Pusuk village, on the coast of the inner Kelabat Bay and close to the Perimping river. In 2016, tin miners had depleted much of the river’s tin and began moving into the bay. Over time, Maryono saw water levels drop at low tide; sand churned up from the bottom coated corals and settled on beaches. In the river, sediment displaced water. With heavy rains, farms close to the river began flooding, destroying crops. Rewards from fishing the bay also dropped precipitously.
“It’s clear if you just look at it. The area isn’t fit for mining. If it’s mined, the river becomes more shallow and communities are pushed out,” Maryono says.
Maryono and a consortium of fishing villages, which he leads, scored a win earlier this month. After years of discussions with provincial officials, the government declared the bay a zone of ‘zero mining’. For this particular area, officials prioritized the surrounding conservation areas and ten villages that would no longer compete with the sediment plumes of tin miners. However, other areas of Bangka-Belitung were officially slated for mining, and protests continue.
“We don’t know if we can call it a success because the miners are pretty smart,” he said. The outer bay is still open to mining, and current mining permits for the inner bay have not been cancelled. “So even if they operate elsewhere, we’ll still feel the effects.”
In theory, tracing tin in Indonesia isn’t difficult. Only one company is allowed to export tin, the state-owned PT Timah. Small-scale miners work through intermediaries to get their hands on some of the income that trickles down. However, law enforcement has not pursued these links in the chain. In the meantime, PT Timah says it has built artificial coral reefs and plans to release squid chicks to repopulate the sea.
Maryono and his neighbors want to show companies and government that the bay can be used for more than mining. At an island in the middle, they’ve begun to cultivate seaweed. They’ve designed village beachfronts for tourists who come seeking the dense mangroves and photogenic landscapes. If outsiders recognize the bay as a tourist attraction or source of lucrative aquaculture, the villages can get government on its side.
“It isn’t our job [to protect the environment]. There are agencies for this, but so far it has only been us,” Maryono says.
Really great article.
Love the focus on a less reported commodity in tin, relative to some of the other base metals that dominate coverage. It'll be interesting to observe the broad shifts in commodity demand in the coming decades that result from the energy transition.