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With an output of 270,000 tons per year, Sigma Lithium has been increasing its lithium mining in the Jequitinhonha Valley, southern region of Brazil. Its pile of waste rock already covers 560,000 square meters (6 million square feet) of land and is encroaching on homes in the neighboring traditional community. Dust and noise produced by the mining operation has been causing respiratory and psychiatric problems in the local residents, which are also suffering from silted-up rivers and cracks in their homes caused by detonations.
Sigma’s hurried growth is driven by high demand for the metal on the international market, especially for the manufacture of electric cars in China, Japan, Europe and the United States. Other mining companies are also competing for lithium extraction opportunities in the region today.
While Sigma operates at full steam to compensate for a sudden drop in lithium prices (by nearly 90% as compared with 2022), the U.S.-owned company Atlas is about to obtain its operating license for Araçuaí, also in Jequitinhonha Valley; Australia’s Pilbara Minerals has announced its intention to purchase mining rights in Salinas for 1.95 billion Reals ($337 million), and CBL (Companhia Brasileira de Lítio), which is working an old subterranean mine next to Sigma’s, plans to triple its production.
According to Edson Farias Mello, geology professor at Rio de Janeiro Federal University, “if the community is being affected by the dust and the noise, measures must be defined for the company to take so this stops happening. It may be concluded that the mining project must be changed.” In terms of the impacts on the stream, Mello says the waterway must be protected. “If it is under a real threat, then there is nonconformity.”
"At 6 a.m., following yet another noisy night, the Santos family is already up. “Things were easy in the old days. We would hear birds singing, drink water from the creek and our kids didn’t get sick. After this company came in, it’s like this: No one can sleep, the children are always coughing and we have no peace,” says Angela, the mother, as she lights her clay woodstove that sits behind her home, face to face with the stockpile of waste rock.", says the story published by Mongabay and Folha de S. Paulo newspaper.