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Over 400 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle in the Krasnoyarsk Krai region of Siberia is the town of Norilsk, population 170,000. Developed in the 1930s by the then-Soviet Union, it is one of the coldest as well as one of most most polluted places in the world.

The Western Australia Environmental Protection Authority has agreed to conduct a full environmental assessment of Talison Lithium’s plans for a major expansion of the Greenbushes lithium mine, the largest in the world, after 95 percent of the 364 comments submitted to the agency demanded action.

Some three quarters of the word’s supply of cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where children as young as 10 years old help extract the metal from hand dug shafts in the Tilwezembe mine in Katanga province.

Baotou Iron & Steel Group in China’s Inner Mongolia province is planning to spend 2 billion yuan (US$280 million) to expand a huge manmade lake near Baotou city that contains toxic historical “tailings” (waste left behind after processing ore) from the world’s largest rare earth mine and refinery.

Indigenous communities in Chile are trying to strike a deal with Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile (SQM), based in Santiago, Chile, and Albemarle, which is based in Charlotte, North Carolina, to reduce the environmental impact of the world’s largest lithium mines.

Dateline Resources has been granted U.S. government approval to mine for gold and rare earths at the Colosseum project inside the Mojave National Preserve in California, despite the fact that major questions about the project being raised by the agency that manages U.S. national parks and monuments.

Indigenous communities in Suriname have sued their government to withdraw an agreement with Chinalco (Aluminum Corporation of China Limited), to dig for bauxite near the village of Bakhuis in the central region of the country.

Facebook shut down its eight year-old fact checking program this month provoking a slew of criticism that the social media giant was bowing to pressure from the incoming U.S. presidency of Donald Trump, who will take office on January 20.

A U.S. federal court ruled in favor of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma after it sued Enel Group for violating its tribal sovereignty. Enel was ordered to remove a massive 84-turbine wind farm that it built without obtaining mining permission, in order to profit from the renewable energy boom. 

Some 49 migrant workers employed by NBTC, a construction company in Kuwait, were killed in a fire that broke out on June 12 at a residential building leased by their employer, while another 50 were injured. Most of the workers were from India.

When black rain poured down around the Tata Steel plant in IJmuiden, a shipping town in the Netherlands, residents were told that they had no need to worry so long as they kept their windows closed, peeled their vegetables, and washed their hands more frequently. That was in 2018.

An explosion at Aricell’s lithium metal battery factory in Hwaseong city in South Korea killed 23 workers in late June 2024. Most of the dead were low paid and undocumented female migrant workers from China who had not received properly training in industrial safety, according to their family members.

A proposed US$2.5 billion open-pit copper and iron mining complex, under development by Andes Iron, that would have threatened Humboldt penguins and other marine species, has been denied permission to proceed after a years-long legal battle fought by local communities and environmental groups. The project was also embroiled in a corruption scandal linked to former president Sebastian Pinera.

Spills from Petroperú’s oil drilling have devastated the Marañón river in Peru for some 50 years. In order to tackle the pollution, a group of Kukama Indigenous women sued the government and Petroperú asserting that the river is a living entity with rights that should be protected. In March 2024, a court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and ordered the company to clean up the river.