Global Centers Track 2: SuReMin: Sustainable, resilient, responsible global minerals supply chain

To decarbonize at the scale and pace required to address climate change, there is an increasing demand for useful and usable research that can inform and strengthen a sustainable international minerals supply chain. Accordingly, SuReMin will conduct research and develop educational opportunities to guide the development of this supply chain. The Track 2 Design Phase will entail developing a research agenda for the management, reuse and disposal of mining waste, community-engaged social and environmental life cycle assessment of minerals mining, and low-cost, scalable methods for environmental and social data collection.

SuReMin’s founding collaborators include Northwestern University, Montana Technical University, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (UC), the Sustainable Minerals Institute (SMI) – an entity of the University of Queensland (Australia) located in Santiago, Chile, the Universidad de los Andes, and the Universidad Iberoamericana (Mexico). These partners convene expertise and perspective that can catalyze cutting edge, impactful research while also training future engineers to be global, collaborative, and transdisciplinary innovators.

Inclusion of SuReMin’s international partners is notable because voices from the Global South – including Chile and Mexico - are notably underrepresented in sustainable mining research, despite this region contributing over 35 million metric tons of critical minerals for lithium-ion batteries alone annually.

SuReMin’s Track 2 Design Phase goal is to establish an integrated research team and identify a clear pathway towards a future Global Center by exploring and refining research, education, and broadening participation activities. To develop the Center’s research agenda, SuReMin will host three workshops to gather feedback from universities, government agencies, industry, non-profit organizations, and communities to aid in its crafting.

The workshop topics are 1) low-cost, scalable acquisition techniques for environmental and social data, 2) sustainable mining waste management, reuse, and disposal, and 3) community-engaged life cycle assessment of minerals mining. SuReMin will also develop a compendium of data sources to quantify social and environmental effects of mining in Chile and the U.S.

Furthermore, pilot projects will contribute a new, community-engaged LCA for a copper or lithium mining community in Chile, a low computational-cost platform to screen potentially problematic tailing dam infrastructure, and new methods to recover metals from mining leachates with minimal chemical and energy requirements. To explore and refine education programming, SuReMin will support an undergraduate trek to Chile, offer a graduate research seminar, and explore the expansion of Northwestern’s experiential international education program to additional partners in Chile.

This award is funded by the Global Centers program, an innovative program that supports use-inspired research addressing global challenges related to climate change and/or clean energy. Track 2 design awards support U.S.-based researchers to bring together international teams to develop research questions and partnerships, conduct landscape analyses, synthesize data, and/or build multi-stakeholder networks to advance their use-inspired research at larger scale in the future.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.