Research combined long-term ethnography with interdisciplinary experimentation across the social and natural sciences. Fieldwork in Chile, China, and Norway followed lithium from salt flats and refineries to laboratories and recycling plants, revealing how global energy transitions depend on multiple, unequal sites and scales.
In Chile, the study traced how lithium extraction reconfigures territories and ecologies far beyond the salt flats of the Atacama Desert. It developed the concept of off-sites to describe the hidden infrastructures—ports, refineries, power plants, desalination facilities, and transport corridors—that sustain “green” extraction while remaining invisible in transition policies. These off-sites expose how decarbonisation still depends on fossil fuels, freshwater, and fragile desert ecologies, displacing Indigenous territories and generating new toxic residues. This work continues through the follow-up project Geopolitics of Lithium Off-Sites, which informs public debates on territorial justice and environmental governance in Chile.
In China, the research examined how state-driven ecological modernisation policies link decarbonisation with national energy security and techno-industrial expansion. Electric vehicles were found to reduce urban emissions while reproducing labour precarity, unequal access, and resource dependencies abroad. The analysis revealed that technological replacement can obscure the need for deeper social transformations, showing how the pursuit of green competitiveness often conflicts with ecological and social goals.
In Norway, the study investigated battery recycling and the country’s celebrated “Green Shift.” It showed that circular industries frequently extend rather than replace extractive infrastructures, sometimes encroaching on forests and protected estuaries. Recycling processes depend on materials that are themselves environmentally harmful, while generous incentives for electric cars stimulate rapid consumption and the export of used vehicles whose end-of-life treatment remains opaque. Scientists and engineers called for policies connecting design, production, and recycling—recommendations now reflected in the forthcoming European Battery Passport.
Across these sites, Worlds of Lithium demonstrated that decarbonisation policies often focus narrowly on measurable emissions while omitting the social, ecological, and political relations that sustain them. It developed comparative ethnographies and conceptual tools such as micro-disasters (slow, accumulative forms of ecological degradation) and off-sites (hidden infrastructures of extraction). These concepts now circulate in academic, legal, and environmental domains and inform ongoing policy discussions.
Public engagement was central throughout. The multilingual Lithium Dialogues and China Powers platforms created spaces where scientists, policymakers, and Indigenous and civil-society actors debated the complexities of energy transitions across more than twenty countries. Together, these initiatives fulfilled the project’s commitment to open access and public dissemination.
See
https://worldsoflithium.eu/(opens in new window)
