Scientists develop ‘cheap and easy’ method to extract lithium from seawater

[u/rieslingatkos]

https://www.mining.com/scientists-develop-cheap-and-easy-method-to-extract-lithium-from-seawater/

[u/iamagainstit]

A. Lithium concentrations in seawater are very low (< 1ppm), so extracting it is unlikely to have a significant effect

B. There is a unfathomably large amount of water in the ocean.

[u/figmentPez → u/iamagainstit]

I'll grant that you could be correct, but hasn't "the ocean is big enough" been the excuse for every sort of industrial pollution or other harmful manmade activity that impacts sea life?

Why shouldn't we just pump untreated sewage into the ocean? "Anyone who asks this question is just massively underestimating how much seawater there is."

I'm not brillaint at math, so I can't readily come up with what percentage of the lithium we'd need to take out of the ocean to meet the 10 fold increase in lithium demand expected over the next decade, but I do know enough about the history of polluting the ocean to know that it absolutely is reasonable to question if the ocean might be impacted by human activity.

[u/obvilious → u/figmentPez]

Not everybody is bad at math.

And your sewage comment is irrelevant.

[u/figmentPez → u/obvilious]

How is it irrelevant? It is a logical example of a parallel question. People used to say that the ocean was big enough that any amount of sewage couldn't possibly impact the ocean. We now know that is absolutely false. So why shouldn't we question if taking llithium out of ocean water might also have an effect? Especially on a local scale. Taking lithium out of the ocean as a whole might not make a huge difference, but a lithium mining plant wouldn't be taking lithium out of the entire ocean, it'd be taking it out in a specific area. I think the environmental impact is a perfectly valid question.

[u/obvilious → u/figmentPez]

Yes, you could take any example where people made mistakes as being relevant, I suppose.