Inside the minerals underworld with UN researcher Tanya Wyatt
The boom for critical elements to power the energy transition has created opportunities for criminals
The energy transition has caused a global boom in demand for minerals. Lithium is vital to electric car batteries and energy storage, cobalt stabilises batteries, and several rare earth minerals are important components in things like wind turbines.
But this boom also risks creating a new extractive underworld. A new report from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime warns of several emerging criminal activities linked to the mineral rush. As well as illegal mining, the report highlights cases of corruption, smuggling, money laundering and human rights abuses.
Tanya Wyatt, the organisation’s lead researcher on crimes that affect the environment, spoke to Wild Crime about the report’s findings and the crimes that are concerning her the most.
What is your role at the UNODC?
I have lots of different things I oversee, but one is the global analysis on crimes that affect the environment, which is a multi-part piece of research that’s looking at the landscape of criminalisation, and asking the question: when the environmental law is violated, when is it actually a crime or not? When do member states or countries actually have a criminal penalty in place for these types of violations?
I think it’s more criminalised than we would have expected. There’s a majority of countries that have at least one criminal penalty in place for the most serious kinds of violations. So I think there’s a good starting point there.
The second piece that we look at is forest crime. So illegal logging and illegal deforestation. And then we’ve had two publications out this year about what we’re calling minerals crime.
How has the global mineral rush created opportunities for criminals?
If you’ve watched any economic news lately you will have seen that gold is getting more and more valuable. So there is this incentive to illegally mine gold, which is one that’s a bit easier in terms of being able to do in a less technical way in terms of equipment. It’s also easier to smuggle.
And then I think both reports show it easily launders into a legal system. There’s really not that many countries in terms of gold or other metals and minerals that have the capacity to refine. And particularly in the case of gold, the global standard is near purity. And so you really have to have some sophistication to be able to do that. So it’s those places where it gets laundered into. And then it’s on a legal market.
Then with critical minerals, the conversation is mostly centred around the energy transition, trying to get off fossil fuels. We need nickel and cobalt and lithium and all these things to create the technologies.
I don’t think it should be overlooked, though, that these critical minerals are also used in the defence industry. So it is energy, but it’s also military equipment and space technology that needs all of these critical minerals.
There are opportunities for criminal infiltration. And it doesn’t look the same as gold. So we can’t just take what we’ve learned from gold or from the Kimberly process for diamonds and paste it on to what we’re doing with critical minerals.
It needs to be a much more context specific approach.
What were some of the criminal activities you found associated with critical minerals?
Corruption is key within all of these. Often at the licencing stage. So maybe you have government actors who are bribed to give licences to areas that actually shouldn’t be mined. Maybe that’s indigenous territory, protected areas or private areas, national parks. So mining is happening where it shouldn’t be because of corruption.
But you also have corruption in terms of changing the paperwork so that [a product] looks like it’s legal even though it’s come from an illegal space.
So it is this overlay of public corruption, but also private corruption, that you have companies that are involved in fraudulently producing this paperwork or knowing that we’ve been given a licence to go in and mine somewhere where they should be or take more than they’ve been allocated.
What environmental crime concerns you the most?
I think it’s going to be waste and pollution. There’s so much going on that we don’t know. And you see the figures about how much waste is produced and generated in the world, and that’s only expected to continue to grow. It’s just getting more and more. And our ability to handle it in environmentally sound ways is not keeping up.
And there is this real, still, high-income to low-income dynamic to it. And I don’t just mean global north to global south, that [wealthy countries] send waste and dump it there. But it’s also within.
Our study is going to show, and you would see this if you looked at data in the Basel Convention, that there’s a huge amount of intra-European trade. So it isn’t just about high-income countries to low-income global south countries, but just even within regions. For example, sending a bunch of waste to poor parts of a country or to southeast Europe where there’s lower incomes.
And then, honestly, there’s just a lot we don’t know about the Americas. The big players aren’t a party to the Basel Convention.
So there isn’t a lot of data there. So I think there’s a lot about waste getting dumped and burned that we don’t know about. So for me, it’s really striking that so much attention has gone to wildlife, which I really love and am passionate about, but we really need to open up and start talking about all this waste and pollution.
How does waste crime work?
Industrial waste is a huge part of it. But it is, unfortunately, ourselves as individual consumers, we think we’re doing the right thing.
When I walk down to the block at the end of the street and I put my plastics in, I put my metals in, you have to trust that your municipality is going to take care of that in an environmentally sound manner. But what we see happening in the waste industry is that you have those collectors or intermediaries that are cutting costs in various kinds of ways. So it could be fraud about what the waste actually is; saying it’s a non-hazardous waste when it’s actually hazardous. That’s one way to save money.
You also have dumping or burning in the countryside, which we’ve seen for decades in Italy, where waste management companies pick up people’s waste and then just take it out to an area and get rid of it. So that saves money.
Another real challenge for this kind of environmental crime is how many corporations are involved. Yes, you have your stereotypical organised crime, maybe having front companies or shell companies that might be dealing with waste management.
But it’s just so embedded within a legal sector that it’s difficult for law enforcement to actually tackle. And it’s big money, particularly when you’re looking at any sort of the waste streams that involve metals.
Why is this such a big problem?
If a lower income country is going to take all of this waste, they sometimes don’t have the technology or the capacity to actually deal with it. So it just becomes pollution. It just gets dumped.
And you have people that are having to deal with it, who work in the industry, who are not properly protected with equipment or masks or any of the equipment that would keep them safe. So they’re coming into contact with hazardous or contaminated things. So it’s a health and safety issue, as well as an environmental issue that you have.
It’s dangerous on a lot of levels.
What are the biggest barriers we have in tackling environmental crime globally?
The data are very poor.. So we’re making decisions and basing policies on a fairly limited amount of evidence.
There’s lots of reasons why there isn’t data or that environmental crime isn’t a priority. It’s also not necessarily a recordable offence. So if police agencies or law enforcement are actually collecting data, it’s not necessarily captured in national crime statistics.
But it’s kept somewhere. They know how much environmental crime is going on, but it isn’t nationally reported and shared onwards.
Every two years at UNODC we collect data globally about a variety of things. And one of the topics that member states can share with us is about all of these different environmental crimes and very few countries actually take the opportunity.
That would be one area where I think we could probably make pretty good improvements fairly quickly, with some awareness raising and some capacity building in terms of keeping these statistics.
Then you could turn that data into evidence-based policies, because I think member states do need to know about what you just asked around, what are the tactics? How is this happening?
That might be a very nerdy answer but we need more data.