The environmental costs of platinum–PGM mining and sustainability: Is the glass half-full or half-empty?

The growing popularity of platinum group metals (or PGMs, including platinum and palladium) for a wide range of applications leads to some interesting issues for mining and sustainability. The uses of PGMs includes catalytic converters for air pollution control in vehicles, growing jewellery use, catalysts for various purposes (especially petroleum and chemicals processing), hydrogen fuel cells, and many others. Given the growing importance of most of these PGM uses in more sustainable technologies or in making industrial processes more efficient, it is critical to understand the complex sustainability issues which surround PGMs. At present, South Africa is the dominant PGMs producer and holds ∼88% of estimated global resources, with additional production and resources in Russia, Zimbabwe, Canada and the United States. Given the concentrated location of PGM resources, what are the likely trends in PGM mining with respect to environmental sustainability? That is, what are the costs in terms of energy, pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, water, land use impacts, social impacts, economic aspects associated with this globally important industry? This paper compiles and analyses a range of data on PGM mining. It synthesizes a unique combination of data which relates typical production aspects such as ore grade and scale with sustainability aspects such as greenhouse, energy and water costs. The findings are critical in understanding the debate about the increasing environmental and social costs of some materials and technologies which are considered crucial for sustainable technologies based on PGMs. Overall, the paper represents a valuable insight into the environmental and resource sustainability of the PGM sector.