The social footprint of permanent magnet production based on rare earth elements – a social life cycle assessment scenario

Abstract

UN-Habitat stated in 2012 that “investment in renewable energies could generate more employment and income for urban households [1]” and for UN-Habitat renewable energies are a central element of the environmental sustainability of urban areas [2]. Renewable energy technologies are seen by the UN as instruments to support the urban transformation process [1]. However, renewable energy technologies such as direct-drive wind turbines based on permanent magnets need non-renewable resources such as rare earth minerals [3-5]. We therefore analyse rare earth production in Australia, Malaysia (Mount Weld), USA (Mountain Pass), and China (Bayan Obo). The Mount Weld process chain takes place in three countries (Australia, Malaysia, China). The Mountain Pass process takes place in the USA and China. All Bayan Obo processes take place in China. In our social life cycle assessment (sLCA), we use the five major social impact categories (labour rights & decent work, health & safety, human rights, governance, community & infrastructure) [6, 7] suggested by UNEP/SETAC [8] and assign to them 21 social indicators of the 2012 Social Hotspots Database [6] to cover every social theme in our sLCA.Using the sLCA model, we estimate the social footprint function for every production step of the three rare earth production chains. Based on the presented social footprint functions, the total social footprint of the three rare earth production sites is estimated for the year 2015 based on the development of the Human Development Index (HDI). For the Mountain Pass process, our analysis reveals very low social risks for the process parts taking place in the United States and significantly higher social risks in China. The Australian processes of Mount Weld cause also a very small social footprint, whereas the processes in Malaysia and China cause a significantly higher social footprint. The Bayan Obo processes have a considerably higher social footprint than the other two process chains.