I been looking all day for the island china brought 10 years ago, I cant find it anywhere now. But it was a mountain sat on top of the ore and they took the lot, looking over google maps and searching like mad, it looks like they taken the bloody island as well!
What your pics dont show is just how toxic the entire area is around those sites. Lithium is not green, the same way Cadmium wasnt green, it dosnt even have the highest power density, its just the cheapest solution per unit of energy. The run offs and wastes created not to mention the large amounts that end up on ships, going to developing countries is not really how we should be doing things. But we will continue to do so because we think its cheaper to do that and let some other generation clear it all up.
Unfun fact
In the UK and EU back before the 90's they used lead in petrol, people used it for fishing, over here they used tiny shot with a split in, so fishermen put the lead in there mouth and close the slit with there teeth, to trap the line.
Now we are in an age where people who were 10-25 back in the 70's have a ever increasing rate of early dementia, it also coincides with the time aluminum was used extensively in cooking and water treatment. There is no proven link between the lead pollution of that era and the metal cooking and type of soft drink cans when tin was first swapped out. But lead today is well studied and treated as toxic.
So verges and trees planted in them back in the era contain very large amounts of lead in the wood...... Same with smoking, my gran used to tell me that years back the doctor would often offer you a cigarette in his office to calm your nerves.
The entire point being.. Lithium like lead and many other things before it, will be seen as one of the very stupid things we used to do. Mining lithium is one thing, the bigger issue is the waste created and the hazard that poses, governments think a max of ten years ahead, people think a max of roughly how many years they think they got left, few actually bother to look at the bigger picture.
The only example i can think of is extremely frustrating, Take the climate change debate, one side says man is a problem and we need to cut carbon output, the other says roughly that nature puts out more than man so mans contribution is negligible.
But has anyone bothered to stand back and see its an entirely mute point? Yes Co2 has gone up and down since time began, yes man in the last 100 years has added to it..........BUT the huge elephant in the room is the Carbon sink!! It dosnt occur to anyone that how it gets there is on zero relevance, if we cut all Carbon today its too late, because we have destroyed so much rain forest and such that we have taken away the planets capacity to cope with Carbon, so how it gets there, or who is responsible is really a red herring.
Its like watching huge wild fire and saying we have always had them, yes indeed we have, but we used to water to put them out with......(BTW the fire comment is just illustration).
So I see your mine pics and think of the amount of waste and the amount of pollution, simply because we want cheap toys and batteries, as i have said so many times, why the feck should we care, isnt us going to have to deal with it.