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NoneThis story originally appeared on Mother Jones and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. I meet Baba Anwar in a crowded, chaotic market in the city of Lagos, Nigeria. He claims he’s in his early 20s, but he looks 15 or 16. Maybe all of 5 feet tall, he’s wearing plastic flip-flops, shorts, and a filthy “Surf Los Angeles” T-shirt and clutching a printed circuit board from a laptop computer, which he says he found in a trash bin. That’s Anwar’s job, scrounging for discarded electronics in Ikeja Computer Village, one of the world’s biggest and most hectic marketplaces for used, repaired, and refurbished electronic products. The market fills blocks and blocks of narrow streets, all swarming with people jostling for access to hundreds of tiny stalls and storefronts offering to sell, repair, or accessorize digital machinery—laptops, printers, cell phones, hard drives, wireless routers, and every variety of adapter and cable needed to run them. The cacophony of a thousand open-air negotiations is underlaid with the rumbling of diesel generators, the smell of their exhaust mixing with the aroma of fried foods hawked by sidewalk vendors. Determined motorcyclists and women in brightly colored dresses carrying trays of little buns on their heads thread their way through the crowds. It’s no place for an in-depth conversation, but with the help of my translator, local journalist Bukola Adebayo, I gather that Anwar arrived here about a year before from his deeply impoverished home state of Kano. “No money at home,” he explains. In Lagos, a pandemoniac megalopolis of more than 15 million, he shares a room with a couple of friends from home, also e-waste scrappers. On a good day, he says, he can make as much as 10,000 naira—about $22 at the time of my visit. Thousands of Nigerians make a meager living recycling e-waste, a broad category that can consist of just about any discarded item with a plug or a battery. This includes the computers, phones, game controllers, and other digital devices that we use and ditch in ever-growing volumes. The world generates more than 68 million tons of e-waste every year, according to the UN, enough to fill a convoy of trucks stretching right around the equator. By 2030, the total is projected to reach 75 million tons. Alaba International, another major electronics market in Lagos. Tearing down a laptop at the Arena Market, also in Lagos. Only 22 percent of that e-waste is collected and recycled, the UN estimates. The rest is dumped, burned, or forgotten—particularly in rich countries, where most people have no convenient way to get rid of their old Samsung Galaxy phones, Xbox controllers, and myriad other gadgets. Indeed, every year, humanity is wasting more than $60 billion worth of so-called critical metals—the ones we need not only for electronics, but also for the hardware of renewable energy, from electric vehicle (EV) batteries to wind turbines. Millions of Americans, like me, spend their workdays on pursuits that lack any physical manifestation beyond the occasional hard-copy book or memo or report. It’s easy to forget that all these livelihoods rely on machines. And that those machines rely on metals torn from the earth. Consider your smartphone. Depending on the model, it can contain up to two-thirds of the elements in the periodic table, including dozens of metals. Some are familiar, like the gold and tin in its circuitry and the nickel in its microphone. Others less so: Tiny flecks of indium make the screen sensitive to the touch of a finger. Europium enhances the colors. Neodymium, dysprosium, and terbium are used to build the tiny mechanism that makes your phone vibrate. Stripping a cell phone in Ikeja Computer Village. Your phone’s battery contains cobalt, lithium, and nickel. Ditto the ones that power your rechargeable drill, Roomba, and electric toothbrush—not to mention our latest modes of transportation, ranging from plug-in scooters and ebikes to EVs. A Tesla Model S has as much lithium as up to 10,000 smartphones. The millions of electric cars and trucks hitting the planet’s roads every year don’t spew pollutants directly, but they’ve got a monstrous appetite for electricity, nearly two-thirds of which still comes from burning fossil fuels—about one-third from coal. Harvesting more of our energy from sunlight and wind, as crucial as that is, entails its own Faustian bargain. Capturing, transmitting, storing, and using that cleaner power requires vast numbers of new machines: wind turbines, solar panels, switching stations, power lines, and batteries large and small. You see where this is going. Our clean energy future, this global drive to save humanity from the ever-worsening ravages of global warming, depends on critical metals. And we’ll be needing more. A lot more. An entrance to Ikeja Computer Village. In all of human history, we have extracted some 700 million tons of copper from the earth. To meet our clean energy goals, we’ll have to mine as much again in 20-odd years. By 2050, the International Energy Agency estimates, global demand for cobalt for EVs alone will soar to five times what it was in 2022. Demand for nickel will be 10 times higher. Lithium, 15 times. “The prospect of a rapid increase in demand for critical minerals—well above anything seen previously in most cases—raises huge questions about the availability and reliability of supply,” the agency warns. Metals are natural products, but the earth does not relinquish them willingly. Mining conglomerates rip up forests and grasslands and deserts, blasting apart the underlying rock and soil and hauling out the remains. The ore is processed, smelted, and refined using gargantuan, energy-guzzling, pollution-spewing machines and oceans of chemicals. “Mining done wrong can leave centuries of harm,” says Aimee Boulanger, head of the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, which works with companies to develop more sustainable extraction practices. “The long lead times for new mining projects pose a serious challenge to scaling up production fast enough to meet growing mineral demand for clean energy technologies.” The harm is staggering. Metal mining is America’s leading toxic polluter . It has sullied the watersheds of almost half of the rivers in the American West. Chemical leaks and mining runoff foul air and water. The mines also generate mountains of hazardous waste, stored behind dams that have a terrifying tendency to fail. Torrents of poisonous sludge pouring through collapsed tailings dams have contaminated waterways in Brazil, Canada, and elsewhere and killed hundreds of people—in addition to the hundreds, possibly thousands, of miners who die in workplace accidents each year. To get what they’re after, mining companies devour natural resources on an epic scale. They dig up some 250 tons of ore and waste rock to get just 1 ton of nickel. For copper, the ratio is double that. Just to obtain the metals inside your 4.5-ounce iPhone, 75 pounds of ore had to be pulled up, crushed, and smelted, releasing up to 100 pounds of carbon dioxide. Mining firms also suck up massive quantities of water and deploy fleets of drill rigs, trucks, diggers, and other heavy machinery that collectively belch out up to 7 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. These operations are not popular with the neighbors. Irate locals and Indigenous communities at this moment are fighting proposed critical-metal mines across the United States, in addition to Brazil, Canada, the Philippines, Serbia, and many other countries. At least 320 anti-mining activists have been killed worldwide since 2012—and they are just the ones we know about. A shop in Ikeja Computer Village. All this said, while researching my book Power Metal , I was surprised to learn that the mining industry no longer gets away—not easily, anyway—with much of the nasty behavior it has been known for. Some collateral damage is inevitable, but a growing awareness of the industry’s history of human rights abuses and dirty environmental practices—as well as public pressure on consumer-facing companies like Apple and Tesla to clean up their supply chains—has made for some real improvements in how big mining firms operate. Yet even these beneficial developments come with an asterisk: In the 1950s, it took three or four years to bring a new copper mine online in the United States. Now the average windup is 16 years. “The long lead times for new mining projects pose a serious challenge to scaling up production fast enough to meet growing mineral demand for clean energy technologies,” the International Energy Agency warned in 2022. If this demand can’t be met, the agency added, nations will fail “to achieve the goals in the Paris Agreement,” the 2016 UN treaty aimed at limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels (and from which president-elect Donald Trump has vowed to withdraw—again—during his second term). And then we’re really in trouble. It’s a vexing conundrum. In my reporting, I have talked to a wide range of people who are deeply and justifiably concerned about the threats our new mining frenzy will pose to the environment. While acknowledging their fears, I would always ask, “Yes, but what’s the alternative?” Their answer, almost always, was, “Recycling!” Engineer Austin and a colleague search for appropriate memory inserts for a customer’s computer. Some of the RAM they sell is scavenged from discarded units. Examining cell phone parts in Ikeja Computer Village. That may sound straightforward. It isn’t. Metal recycling is a completely different proposition from recycling the paper and glass we toss into our home bins for pickup. It turns out that retrieving valuable raw materials sustainably from electronic products—toasters, iPhones, power cables—is a fiendishly complex endeavor, requiring many steps carried out in many places. Manufacturing those products required a multistep international supply chain. Recycling them requires a reverse supply chain almost as complicated. Part of the problem is that our devices typically contain only a small amount of any given metal. In developing countries, though, there are lots of people willing to put in the time and effort required to recover that little bit of value—an estimated tens of thousands of e-waste scavengers in Nigeria alone. Some go door to door with pushcarts, offering to take or even buy unwanted electronics. Others, like Anwar, work the secondhand markets, buying bits of broken gear from small businesses or rescuing them from the trash. Many scavengers earn less than the international poverty wage of about $2.15 per day. I ask Anwar where he’s planning to take his circuit board. “To TJ,” he replies, as if I’d asked him what color the sky is. TJ is Tijjani Abubakar, an entrepreneur who has built a thriving business turning unwanted electronics into cash. His third-floor office, in a dingy concrete building across a roaring four-lane road from the Ikeja market, is a charnel house of dead mobile phones. At one end of the long, crowded room, two skinny young men with screwdrivers pull phone after phone from a sack and crack them like walnuts. Their practiced fingers pull out the green printed circuit boards and toss them with a clatter onto a growing heap at their feet. Thousands of such boards gleam flatly under the glaring LED ceiling lights. More young men sit around on plastic stools sorting them into piles and pulling aside those with the most valuable chips. The air is thick with sweat despite the open windows. At a scuffed wooden desk sits Abubakar himself—a big man with a steady demeanor, lordly in an embroidered brown caftan, red cap, and crisp beard. I await an audience as he fields calls and messages on three different phones and a laptop while negotiating a deal with a couple of visiting traders over an unlabeled bottle of something. A man at Ikeja Computer Village holds a stack of lithium batteries. Abubakar, who looks to be in his mid-forties, has been in the trade nearly 20 years. He, too, hails from Kano, where his father sold clothes—“not a rich man,” he tells me in his even baritone. He earned a business degree from a local university and made his way to Lagos, where a friend introduced him to the e-waste business. “We started small, small, small, small,” he says. But getting a foothold was easier then. Scrap was cheap, even free, because few people were willing to pay for it. Then, as the trade mushroomed, deep-pocketed foreign buyers—from India, Lebanon, and, above all, China—began flocking to Nigeria in search of deals. “Now everybody knows the prices,” Abubakar says. But his business has flourished. He exports several shipping containers full of e-waste every month to buyers in China and Europe. He’s grown wealthy enough to donate textbooks, meals, and cows to families back in Kano. Dead cell phones converted into education and food. Trash into possibilities. Abubakar handles all manner of e-waste, but the phones are his specialty. There is just shy of one mobile account for every one of Nigeria’s 220 million people. “What do I see here?” he asks, indicating his roomful of workers. “I don’t know whether any of these people have a computer. But I know all of them have a phone.” And all of those phones will one day wear out, malfunction, or get tossed by someone eager for a newer model. In 2022, an estimated 5.3 billion mobile phones were discarded worldwide. If you put them end to end, they’d reach almost to the moon and back. Abubakar deploys a vast network of buyers and pickers to source spent phones from Nigeria and neighboring countries, and occasionally as far away as France. They arrive by truck, train, and in sacks carried by people like Anwar. These precisely engineered products were manufactured in sophisticated, high-tech factories under ultra-clean conditions. Here, they are eviscerated by hand on a grimy concrete pad. Abubakar estimates he has about 5,000 workers bringing in millions of phones each year. When I express polite skepticism, he rises and gestures for me to follow. A door in the back of the office leads into a warren of rooms filled either with enormous sacks stuffed with phones, people cracking and sorting phones, or bales of circuit boards ready for shipping. The most desirable components are those circuit boards, etched with copper and often precious metals, including gold, that carry signals among the soldered-on chips and capacitors. The chips are removed for assessment. If they still work, they can be sold for use in refurbished phones. Abubakar shows me a lunch-bag-sized sack of Android chips with serial numbers so tiny I can barely make them out. “This bag is worth around $35,000,” he says. A sack of phone cameras—consisting of the lens you see from the outside attached to a strip of metal foil on the inside—is also valuable. Abubakar trains security cameras on his workers to discourage pilfering. He fired someone the week before for stealing chips, he tells me. None of the phones were made in Nigeria, and their remains won’t stay here either. Extracting the metals therein requires sophisticated and expensive equipment that no facility in Africa has, so Abubakar sells to recyclers in China and Western Europe that do. Annes and friends are scrap buyers in Ikeja Computer Village. The problem of rich countries “dumping” e-waste on poorer ones has received plenty of attention over the past couple of decades. But in West Africa and other parts of the developing world, most e-waste is now generated domestically. The gadgets passing through Abubakar’s facility were largely imported as new or refurbished products, sold to Nigerian consumers, and later discarded. Relatively little goes to waste. If you live on $2 a day, after all, making a dime from a discarded electric toothbrush is worth your effort. The result is that about 75 percent of Nigeria’s e-waste is collected for some kind of recycling. In nearby Ghana, estimates run as high as 95 percent. The landscape is different in the United States, where fewer than one in six dead mobile phones is recycled. The same stat holds in Europe, where roughly two-thirds of all e-waste never makes it into official recycling streams. This is surprising, says Alexander Batteiger, an e-waste expert with the German development organization GIZ, “because we have fully functioning recycling systems.” Or maybe not so surprising. Nobody in the rich world, after all, goes house to house asking for old iPhone 6s or Bluetooth speakers. Sure, there are e-waste collection drives at schools and churches, and you can take old electronics to Best Buy or the local hazardous waste facility—but few people bother. Instead, countless millions of phones and laptops and blenders and microwaves accumulate in attics, closets, junk drawers, garages, and, all too often, the dump. In Africa, businesses like Abubakar’s keep countless tons of toxic trash out of landfills, reduce the need for mining, and create thousands of jobs—hardly a trivial consideration in a nation where nearly two-thirds of people live in poverty. There’s much to celebrate here. But neither is it the whole story. An hour’s drive from Abubakar’s office, through a maelstrom of Lagos traffic, sits the Katangua dumpsite, a sprawling, teeming maze of tiny workshops, scrapyards, wrecking zones, and slums, loosely built around a mountain of trash at least 20 feet tall. This colossus is surrounded by a corroded tin fence held up with bits of scrap wood. Plumes of thick black smoke wend upward from within. The squalor here is unfathomable. The ground underfoot consists of churned-up mud and trampled-in plastic trash. Barefoot children wander among shacks of cardboard, plywood, and plastic sheeting. Adebayo, the local journalist helping me out, and I pick our way around huge puddles, following men and women carrying sacks of discarded metals, all of us retreating to the roadside as trucks piled high with aluminum cans and other scrap wallow past. Practically every type of metal and e-waste is recycled somewhere in this labyrinth. The resourcefulness of the people is as astonishing as the conditions are appalling. At one yard, owner Mohammed Yusuf proudly shows me his aluminum recycling operation. Pickers bring him cans from all over the city, 2 or 3 tons a day. At the rear of the yard, there’s a covered area with a brick-lined, rectangular hole in the ground about the size of a bathtub, and a smell reminiscent of rotting chicken. Speakers and radio parts at Alaba International market. At night, Yusuf tells me, his workers fill the hole with cans, melt them down with a gas-powered torch, then scoop the molten metal into molds using a long ladle. This results in silvery, 2-kilogram ingots pure enough to sell to a manufacturer that makes new cans. The process generates intensely toxic fumes and dust, and his workers wear protective masks. “What about the others nearby?” I ask him. Yusuf nods sagely. That’s why they do it at night, he explains, when the people who live near the yard are asleep in their shacks. Later, squeezing through a gap in the ragged fence, Adebayo and I find ourselves in an open area at the base of the towering garbage pile. There, four young men are tending small fires, burning the coatings off piles of wire to get at the copper inside. The flames are beautiful—deep cupric blues and greens licking up amid the orange. The smoke, thick and oily and reeking of incinerated plastic and rubber, almost certainly carries dioxins, which are known to cause cancer and harm the reproductive system. The men are wearing shorts, T-shirts, and flip-flops—no respirators or other safety gear in sight. Between the open-air smelting, wire burning, and other miscellaneous wrecking, I’m horrified by the thought of how thoroughly poisoned Katangua must be. “Do you worry about breathing the smoke?” I ask one of the burners, a muscular 36-year-old named Alabi Mohammed. He shrugs: “We don’t know any other job. We don’t have any other option.” He’s been living here since he was 8, he says. There are other harmful recycling practices I don’t see at Katangua. Scrapped circuit boards are a good source of palladium, gold, and silver—according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, a ton of circuit boards contains from 40 to 800 times the amount of gold found in a ton of ore. You can run them through a shredder and ship the fragments to special refineries, typically in Europe or Japan, where the gold is extracted with chemicals. “It’s a precise, mostly clean method of recycling, but it’s also very, very expensive,” author Adam Minter explains in his 2014 book, Junkyard Planet . In many developing countries, he notes, the gold is “removed using highly corrosive acids, often without the benefit of safety equipment for the workers. Once the acids are used up, they’re often dumped in rivers and other open bodies of water.” The latter poses clear health and environmental hazards, but it’s cheap and easy, just as extracting copper from plastic-coated wires requires no special equipment—only gasoline and matches. Which is why low-wage laborers around the globe risk their lives burning old extension cords or dousing circuit boards with chemicals to retrieve metals that other low-wage workers risked their lives to dig up in the first place. In Guiyu, home to China’s biggest e-waste recycling complex, studies have found extremely high levels of lead and other toxins in the blood of local children. A 2019 study by Toxics Link, an Indian nonprofit, identified more than a dozen unlicensed e-waste recycling “hot spots” around Delhi employing some 50,000 people—unprotected workers exposed to chemical vapors, metallic dusts, and acidic effluents—and where hazardous wastes were improperly dumped. A man shows a laptop battery in Ikeja Computer Village. Spent lithium batteries present their own recycling challenge. They are potentially among the world’s best sources for critical metals—one study found that battery recycling theoretically could satisfy nearly half of global demand for certain metals. Yet only about 5 percent of them get recycled because they are uniquely hard to handle—and dangerous. Nigeria, for example, is awash in lithium-ion batteries, but no place on the continent recycles them. They need to be exported. Shippers don’t want to take them, however, because of their disturbing tendency to burst into flames when punctured, crushed, or overheated. Battery fires can exceed 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. They also emit toxic gases and are very hard to extinguish. American consumers are asked to bring unwanted lithium batteries to a domestic recycler or a hazardous waste site, and for good reason. Every year, batteries from everything from old Priuses to sex toys cause hundreds of fires in US scrapyards, landfills, and even on garbage trucks, causing millions of dollars in damage. Residents of Fredericktown, Missouri, even had to evacuate their homes earlier this month when a local battery recycling facility exploded dramatically into flames. Even in developing countries, unwanted batteries often end up in local landfills, where, beyond the fire risk, they leak toxic chemicals. Or unscrupulous exporters mislabel them, bribing port officials to not examine their shipments too closely. “I’ve heard there’s a major fire every six months,” says Eric Frederickson, vice president of operations at Call2Recycle, America’s largest battery-collection organization, “but you never hear about most of them, because they just tip the container over the side of the boat.” Arena Market in Lagos. Reinhardt Smit is trying something different. He’s the supply chain director for Closing the Loop, a Netherlands-based startup that aims to recycle phones from Africa using certifiably sound environmental and social methods: no burned cables, battery fires, trashed plastics, or unprotected workers—every step of the process done responsibly, the way Western consumers like it. In a 2021 pilot project, Closing the Loop collected and sent 5 tons of phones—plastic, batteries, cables, and all—from Nigeria to a Belgian recycler in what it claims was the first such legally sanctioned shipment ever. The project succeeded from a sustainability standpoint, but it was a money-loser. Clean recycling, it turns out, is hideously expensive. The phones were sourced from Hinckley Recycling, one of Nigeria’s two (yes, only two) fully licensed e-waste handlers. At Hinckley’s compound on the outskirts of Lagos, workers dismantle phones, computers, and TVs in a clean and well-lit warehouse, wearing reflective vests and protective gloves. It’s clearly a safer and more humane workplace than the others I witnessed, but that adds to the cost. Convincing a shipper to transport the batteries also required a pricey workaround: They were removed from the phones and placed in barrels filled with sand, eliminating the fire danger. But that meant Closing the Loop had to pay extra to transport hundreds of pounds of sand per shipment. “It is clear that the biggest mine of the future has to be the car that we already built.” Dealing with unwanted materials was another cost. “If I recycle every component in a phone, I lose money,” explains Adrian Clewes, Hinckley’s managing director. Everyone wants copper, for instance, but phones are mostly plastic, which Closing the Loop must pay a recycler to take. Clewes talks about “positive” and “negative” fractions, meaning the profitable components versus those that cost him money. Some fractions toggle between positive and negative depending on the prevailing prices. Say you want to sell a bag of circuit boards containing a total of 1 pound of copper. And say it will cost the smelter $2 to extract the metal. If copper is selling for $4 a pound, the smelter can buy the boards for $1 and make a tidy profit. If copper drops to $3, the deal’s off and the boards are sitting in your warehouse. If you have ample space, you can wait for prices to bounce back. If not, maybe you’re tempted to bring those boards to the dump. Finally, you have your administrative costs. Global regulations preventing rich countries from dumping hazardous waste on poorer ones have, ironically enough, made it harder to get waste out of the poor countries. The Basel Convention, for one, requires any ship carrying e-waste to get approval from the exporting and importing countries and consent from any country where it might dock en route. This creates oceans of red tape. “Observing the Basel notifications can be painful. It takes months,” says Batteiger, the German e-waste expert. “The Basel Convention is valuable—without it, there would be more dumping—but it has the side effect of blocking exports from the developing world to industrialized countries.” All told, the cost of doing things by the book makes it almost impossible to turn a profit. Smit’s idea is to get green-minded corporations to cover the difference by paying him to recycle one dead African phone for each new phone it buys. The concept is akin to selling carbon offsets, and it’s gaining some traction. Closing the Loop now operates in some 10 African countries and has collected several million dead electronic devices. Its near-future target is 2 million phones per year, though that’s admittedly a drop in the bucket. “There are 2 billion phones sold every year,” concedes founder Joost de Kluijver. “We can’t collect all that.” Comparing the efforts of companies like Closing the Loop and those of the “informal” sector in Nigeria and elsewhere, which provides jobs for thousands of desperate people, it’s hard to say which is better. One might ask, better for whom? Unregulated dumping, wire burning, and the lack of safety equipment don’t meet Western environmental and labor standards. But those standards aren’t top of mind for people who can barely feed and house themselves. Arena Market. There are other geopolitical aspects to the race for critical metals. Russia, for example, is a prodigious exporter of copper, nickel, palladium, and other metals so crucial that they were spared from international sanctions after Vladimir Putin launched his war on Ukraine. And then there’s China, which—via its own resources, lax standards, diplomatic clout, and overseas investments—has come to dominate the global supply chain. Regardless of origin, most critical metals will at some point pass through China, which controls more than half of global refining capacity for cobalt, graphite (another battery ingredient), and lithium, and almost as much for nickel and copper. Using those metals, its factories pump out most of the world’s solar panels, a hefty share of its wind turbines, and a majority of its EVs. It also produces nearly three-quarters of lithium-ion batteries and recycles far more of them than any other nation. A subsidiary of CATL, China’s biggest battery maker, can now recycle up to 120,000 tons per year and is investing billions in new plants. Congress, having deemed China’s dominance in these sectors a threat “to economic growth, competitiveness, and national security,” has responded by sinking money into alternative sources. The 2022 infrastructure bill included $7 billion to develop a domestic supply chain for battery minerals, and the Inflation Reduction Act, passed the same year, unlocked billions more to subsidize batteries and EVs manufactured with domestically sourced metals—though some of the funds may be clawed back or left unspent under the new Republican leadership. “The economics are very challenging ... There’s no clear solution on how to get these things out of people’s drawers.” In the United States and elsewhere, major automakers are partnering with recyclers and even building their own plants, recognizing that old batteries are a cheaper, cleaner, and more appealing source of critical metals than mining is. “It is clear that the biggest mine of the future has to be the car that we already built,” Mercedes-Benz Group chairman Ola Källenius said at a 2021 climate summit. In remote Nevada, a company called Redwood Materials has built an enormous EV battery recycling operation. Redwood has inked deals with Tesla, Amazon, and Volkswagen and has attracted nearly $2 billion in capital. Redwood’s main rival is Canada-based Li-Cycle, which had more than 400 employees at the time of my visit. The company partners with commodities giant Glencore and boasts facilities in Arizona; Alabama; New York; Kingston, Ontario; and elsewhere. Earlier this month, Li-Cycle secured a $475 million line of credit from the Department of Energy. It is now capable of processing about 53,000 tons a year of shredded battery material, which consists mainly of copper and aluminum flakes, plus a grainy sludge known as “black mass” that contains cobalt, lithium, and nickel. At the company’s Kingston headquarters, I get a tour from Ajay Kochhar, a chemical engineer with neatly combed black hair who cofounded Li-Cycle in 2016 with a metallurgist pal. “We heard lots of people say, ‘You guys are too early,’” he tells me with a smile. The company produced its first batch of shredded battery material that year. “It took us three months to get 20 tons,” Kochhar says. Five years later, his company went public at a valuation of almost $1.7 billion. (As of this writing, the number is considerably lower.) Stripping a computer circuit board at Ikeja Computer Village. On the day of my visit, an aggregator had delivered a truckload of batteries from laptops, cell phones, and power tools. I watch as the batteries are loaded onto a conveyor belt, where workers strip off plastic casings and packaging and check labels to make sure they are indeed lithium-ion batteries. Further along, the batteries are dumped into a column of water leading to a shredder whose mighty steel teeth rip them into tiny pieces. Any remaining plastic floats to the surface and is skimmed off. The metals are separated in further steps. Breakfast-cereal-sized flakes of copper and aluminum are poured into large, heavy plastic bags, leaving the black mass behind. Li-Cycle currently sells the former metals to companies like Glencore, which make them into ingots. The black mass goes to other firms that use chemicals to extract the remaining metals. Perhaps the biggest immediate challenge for companies like Li-Cycle, oddly, is a dearth of batteries to shred. It’s mostly pre-consumer factory scrap and defective batteries from manufacturers keeping their conveyers busy. EVs are so new to the market that few have been junked—and even those are often snapped up for uses such as off-grid power storage. Most consumer lithium batteries aren’t collected at all. “We’ve looked at doing the collection ourselves, but the economics are very challenging,” Kochhar told me. “There’s no clear solution on how to get these things out of people’s drawers.” So how can more e-waste be brought into the reverse supply chain? One approach is to shift the onus onto the firms that manufactured the gadgets in the first place, a policy known as “extended producer responsibility.” China and much of Europe have codified this policy in laws that govern not only e-waste, but also glass, plastics, and even cars. Sometimes, it just means charging manufacturers a fee to help cover the downstream recycling costs. In the EU, though, carmakers are responsible for collecting and recycling their own dead vehicles. China, which since 2018 has required manufacturers to collect and recycle lithium-ion batteries, also mandates that new batteries contain minimum amounts of certain recycled materials. China now recycles at least half of its batteries, according to CATL. “In North America, it’s mainly us and Redwood,” Kochhar says. “There are many more in Europe.” But what’s happening in China, he says, “is way ahead of what we’re doing here.” Old laptop computers at a shop in Ikeja Computer Village. As a strictly economic proposition, it’s often cheaper to mine fresh metals than recycle them. And some of the relevant products are tremendously hard to recycle: Less than 5 percent of rare earth magnets are currently recycled, for example, and an estimated 9 in 10 spent solar panels—which cost roughly $20 to $30 to recycle versus $1 to $2 to bring to the dump—end up in landfills. Ditto the massive blades on wind turbines, of which more than 720,000 tons are projected to be trashed by 2040. The bottom line is that meaningful e-waste recycling in the United States is probably going to require government support. And why not subsidize? China, our biggest rival in the clean energy sector, offers tax breaks to metal recyclers, even as US taxpayers spend billions subsidizing fossil fuels and mining operations . Under the Biden administration, Congress directed some $370 billion to bolster renewable energy technologies, including nearly $40 billion for nuclear energy and more than $12 billion to promote sales and manufacturing of EVs and their batteries, but has included only a couple of billion toward recycling. New technologies might help somewhat. British researchers are working on inexpensive reactors they hope can facilitate recovery of rare earths. In Texas, Apple is testing a robot that can disassemble 200 iPhones per hour to aid in recycling. Mining giant Rio Tinto is experimenting with ways to extract lithium that exists in boron mining waste, and a Canadian startup is working to recover rare earths from tin-mine tailings. Scientists are even studying plants that can suck up trace metals through their roots and concentrate them in their sap, stems, or leaves. The sap of Pycnandra acuminata , a tree that grows on the nickel-rich Pacific island of New Caledonia, can contain more than 25 percent nickel. Other “hyperaccumulators” slurp up cobalt, lithium, and zinc. Startups are springing up, hoping to capitalize on these special properties, which could also be used to clean up polluted soil. None of this is a silver bullet. Even if humanity could recover all of the critical metals in use—and we can’t—we’d still have to mine more to meet rising demand. Consider that we now recycle less than 1 percent of the lithium used around the world, and we’ll be mining hard-to-recover rare earths for decades to come. “Nothing—nothing—is 100 percent recyclable, and many things, including things we think are recyclable, like iPhone touch screens, are unrecyclable,” Minter writes in Junkyard Planet . “Everyone from the local junkyard to Apple to the US government would be doing the planet a very big favor if they stopped implying otherwise, and instead conveyed a more realistic picture of what recycling can and can’t do.” A stall in Alaba International market. Recycling is important, yes. But it is also utterly insufficient to meet our needs. We tend to think of it as the best alternative to using virgin materials. In fact, it often can be one of the worst. Consider a glass bottle. To recycle it, you have to smash it to pieces, melt down the bits, and mold them into a whole new bottle—an industrial process that requires a lot of energy, time, and expense. Or you could just wash it and reuse it. That’s a better alternative—and hardly a new idea. For much of the last century, gas stations, dairies, and other companies sold products in glass bottles that they would later collect, wash, and reuse. Rendering a phone, car battery, or solar panel down to its constituent metals requires a great deal more energy, cost, and, as we’ve seen, unsafe labor than refurbishing that product. You can buy refurbished computers, phones, and even solar panels online and in some stores. But refurbishing is only really widespread in the developing world. If you’re a North American no longer satisfied with your iPhone 8, there are plenty of people in less-affluent countries who would be happy to take it. There are important lessons here, and perhaps the most important of all is this: As we look ahead, we will need to start thinking beyond merely replacing fossil fuels with renewables and increasing our supplies of raw materials. Rather, we will need to reshape our relationship to energy and natural resources altogether. That seems like a tall order, but there’s a range of things we can do—as consumers, as voters, as human beings—to assuage the downstream effects of our technological arms race. Moving forward, our critical metals will come from all sorts of mines and scrapyards and recycling centers around the globe. Some will emerge from new sources, using new methods and technologies. And the choices we make about where and how we get those metals, and who prospers and suffers in the process, are tremendously important. But no less important is the question of how much of all these things we truly need—and how to reduce that need. We’re lucky in one respect: We’re still only at the beginning of a historic worldwide transition. The key will be figuring out how to make it work without repeating the worst mistakes of the last one. This article is adapted from Vince Beiser’s Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future , published November 19 by Riverhead (an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, all rights reserved).
JERUSALEM — A new round of Israeli airstrikes in Yemen on Thursday targeted the Houthi rebel-held capital and multiple ports, while the World Health Organization's director-general said the bombardment occurred nearby as he prepared to board a flight in Sanaa, with a crew member injured. "The air traffic control tower, the departure lounge — just a few meters from where we were — and the runway were damaged," Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on social media. He added that he and U.N. colleagues were safe. "We will need to wait for the damage to the airport to be repaired before we can leave," he said, without mentioning the source of the bombardment. U.N. spokesperson Stephanie Tremblay later said the injured person was with the U.N. Humanitarian Air Service. Israel's army later told The Associated Press it wasn't aware that the WHO chief or delegation were at the location in Yemen. People are also reading... Smoke rises Thursday from the area around the International Airport after an airstrike in Sanaa, Yemen. The Israeli strikes followed several days of Houthi launches setting off sirens in Israel. The Israeli military said in a statement it attacked infrastructure used by the Iran-backed Houthis at the international airport in Sanaa and ports in Hodeida, Al-Salif and Ras Qantib, along with power stations, claiming they were used to smuggle in Iranian weapons and for the entry of senior Iranian officials. Israel's military added it had "capabilities to strike very far from Israel's territory — precisely, powerfully, and repetitively." The strikes, carried out more than 1,000 miles from Jerusalem, came a day after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said "the Houthis, too, will learn what Hamas and Hezbollah and Assad's regime and others learned" as his military has battled those more powerful proxies of Iran. The Houthi-controlled satellite channel al-Masirah reported multiple deaths and showed broken windows, collapsed ceilings and a bloodstained floor and vehicle. Iran's foreign ministry condemned the strikes. The U.S. military also targeted the Houthis in recent days. The U.N. says the targeted ports are important entryways for humanitarian aid for Yemen, the poorest Arab nation that plunged into a civil war in 2014. Over the weekend, 16 people were wounded when a Houthi missile hit a playground in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, while other missiles and drones were shot down. Last week, Israeli jets struck Sanaa and Hodeida, killing nine people, calling it a response to previous Houthi attacks. The Houthis also have been targeting shipping on the Red Sea corridor, calling it solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. The U.N. Security Council has an emergency meeting Monday in response to an Israeli request that it condemn the Houthi attacks and Iran for supplying them weapons. Relatives and friends mourn over the bodies of five Palestinian journalists Thursday who were killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City at the Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah. Journalists killed in Gaza Meanwhile, an Israeli strike killed five Palestinian journalists outside a hospital in Gaza overnight, the territory's Health Ministry said. The strike hit a car outside Al-Awda Hospital in the built-up Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. The journalists worked for local news outlet Al-Quds Today, a television channel affiliated with the Islamic Jihad militant group. Islamic Jihad is a smaller and more extreme ally of Hamas and took part in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack in southern Israel that ignited the war. Israel's military identified four of the men as combat propagandists and said that intelligence, including a list of Islamic Jihad operatives found by soldiers in Gaza, confirmed that all five were affiliated with the group. Associated Press footage showed the incinerated shell of a van, with press markings visible on the back doors. The Committee to Protect Journalists says more than 130 Palestinian reporters have been killed since the start of the war. Israel hasn't allowed foreign reporters to enter Gaza except on military embeds. Israel banned the pan-Arab Al Jazeera network and accuses six of its Gaza reporters of being militants. The Qatar-based broadcaster denies the allegations and accuses Israel of trying to silence its war coverage, which has focused heavily on civilian casualties from Israeli military operations. Mourners cry Thursday while they take the last look at the body of a relative, one of eight Palestinians killed, during their funeral in the West Bank city of Tulkarem. Israeli soldier killed Separately, Israel's military said a 35-year-old reserve soldier was killed during fighting in central Gaza. A total of 389 soldiers have been killed in Gaza since the start of the ground operation. The war began when Hamas-led militants stormed across the border, killing around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting about 250. About 100 hostages are still inside Gaza, at least a third of whom are believed to be dead. Israel's air and ground offensive has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians, according to the Health Ministry. It says more than half the fatalities are women and children, but doesn't say how many of the dead were fighters. The offensive caused widespread destruction and hunger and drove around 90% of the population of 2.3 million from their homes. Hundreds of thousands are packed into squalid camps along the coast, with little protection from the cold, wet winter. Also Thursday, people mourned eight Palestinians killed by Israeli military operations in and around Tulkarem in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. The Israeli military said it opened fire after militants attacked soldiers, and it was aware of uninvolved civilians who were harmed in the raid. Get local news delivered to your inbox!Atletico Madrid to rival Tottenham for La Liga starVikings special teams coordinator Matt Daniels knows he can only hold on to young players who are developing as part of his unit for so long. Rookie linebacker Bo Richter is one Daniels is cherishing while he can. “He continues to excel in his role,” Daniels said Tuesday at TCO Performance Center. “Surely enough, this is usually how it goes. You just keep dominating, keep having an impact on special teams, and surely enough you’ll mature and ‘Coach Hat’ [Daniels’ nickname] will be sending you on your way to go do bigger and better things on defense. “And that’s where he’s heading.” Richter, a undrafted free agent signing out of Air Force, made one of a pair of standout positive special teams plays for the Vikings in their overtime win against the Bears on Sunday at Soldier Field. Those plays were negated by the Bears late in an 11-point comeback to tie the score in the final seconds of regulation. Richter, who the Vikings signed as an undrafted free agent this spring, fell on a muffed punt recovery in the third quarter to set up a five-play, 15-yard scoring drive. Chicago return man DeAndre Carter waved for teammates to move out of the way but was struck by the ball himself, allowing Richter to recover it and the Vikings to regain possession. The Vikings had two other punt recoveries off muffs earlier this season that led to no points. “I was just finally glad that we finally got a muffed punt,” Daniels said. “I was just praying and hoping that ball didn’t roll out of bounds. It was good for him to get on that.” Earlier, in the second quarter, Vikings defensive lineman Jerry Tillery blocked a 48-yard field-goal attempt by Cairo Santos. Brian Asamoah recovered and returned it 22 yards. Daniels said blocking field goals has been a post-practice emphasis in recent weeks, and he felt the line quickly got off the ball and was able to penetrate deep into the Bears backfield, making it easier for Tillery to get a hand on the ball. The special teams success dwindled late in the game, with the Vikings giving up two big plays on kickoffs to hand Bears rookie quarterback Caleb Williams and company prime field position to tie the score. Carter made up for his earlier mistake with a 55-yard kickoff return that kick-started the Bears’ comeback. Daniels said the intent was for Parker Romo to boot the ball into or out of the end zone on the kickoff, but Romo slightly toeing it into shifting winds hung up the ball. Carter caught it inside the 5-yard line, took off just outside the left hash and shook off four defenders before being brought down by outside linebacker Dallas Turner at the Vikings’ 40-yard line. “At the end of the day, we just gotta do a great job of defeating blocks,” Daniels said. “That’s what it boils down to, and that starts with me making sure I’m emphasizing it during the week.” Then, after the Bears scored eight plays later and added a two-point conversion to make the score 27-24 with 29 seconds left, an onside kick by Santos hit the back of tight end Johnny Mundt’s foot and the Bears recovered. Santos’ 48-yard field goal as time expired sent the game to overtime. Some redemption for the special teams unit came when Romo nailed a 29-yard field goal to win the game in overtime; long snapper Jake McQuaide made sure to retrieve the winning ball for Romo amid the celebration. Daniels pointed out that Romo, who the Vikings signed Nov. 5 when starting kicker Will Reichard moved to injury reserve because of a quad injury, has been tested in his first few weeks of NFL action. “This is gonna be the first time he actually gets to hit indoors,” Daniels said of Sunday’s game against the Cardinals at U.S. Bank Stadium. “He’s hit basically three outside road games.”
Cyber Monday shoppers expected to set a record on biggest day for online shoppingThe Berlin government has sliced the city’s arts and culture budget by €130 million (about $135 million), sparking concerns that institutions may be forced to close and imperiling the German capital’s status as an arts hub. The cuts, which represent 12 percent of the sector’s budget, are part of the city’s 2025 spending plan and have been robustly defended by Berlin’s mayor, Kai Wegner, a member of the right-wing Christian Democratic Union. According to the Art Newspaper (TAN), Wegner blamed the cuts on the “green dreams” of the prior, left-wing administration, citing a need for a “change of mentality” and pointing to the city’s “record” €40 billion budget. Bandied about for weeks, the cuts almost certainly place jobs and programs in jeopardy, and the arts community has been vocal about these and other possible negative outcomes, including a tamping-down of experimental or less commercial programming. Emma Enderby, director of the nonprofit KW Institute for Contemporary Art, told TAN that “culture and clubs bring people to Berlin. They don’t come here for the food, they come here for the history and the culture.” Enderby noted that organizations have still not received information regarding the full budget and that it may not be communicated until mid-January. Nevertheless, with such notice, institutions are already making difficult choices. “We are letting certain positions go and closing certain programmatic initiatives, such as one of our mediation programs,” Enderby told TAN. Calling the cuts “short-sighted,” she explained that “in Berlin, culture costs around 2 percent of the overall economy, yet they’re cutting us between around 10 percent and in some cases 50 percent.” “It’s a very bad decision—pennywise and pound foolish in every sense,” Paul Spies, a co-president of the Berlin Museums Association and former director of the Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin, told the publication. “And it’s been done so bluntly and without input from the cultural department. It doesn’t seem that the Senate has listened to the specialists about what is possible and what is not possible.” Along with musuems, artists are expected to be affected by the cuts. “Many initiatives like studio spaces and residences that support them are also being removed or cut,” said Enderby, “which will completely change the attractiveness of coming to Berlin, an increasingly expensive city to live in.”
All Blacks v Italy Kick-off: 9.10am Sunday 24 November Allianz Stadium, Turin Live blog updates on RNZ Sport This is it, the last test of the season for Scott Robertson's All Blacks. So far it's been nine wins and four losses, the form guide suggests this one will end in a comfortable victory. The magnificent Allianz Stadium in Turin is the venue for the match, while the All Blacks have played in quite a few Italian cities over the years, this will be the first time they have visited the northern city most well known for being the home of the country's automotive industry and Juventus football club. Allianz is the home ground of Juventus, the All Blacks have been doing a bit of promo work with them this week given their shared sponsorship with adidas. It's shaping up to be a cold night in Turin, with snow falling during the week and the temperature expected to be below freezing at kick-off. This will be the last time on the park as All Blacks for both Sam Cane and TJ Perenara, both men bow out having played 105 and 89 tests respectively. Here's a look at the teams: All Blacks: 1. Ethan de Groot 2. Codie Taylor 3. Tyrel Lomax 4. Scott Barrett (c) 5. Patrick Tuipulotu 6. Wallace Sititi 7. Sam Cane 8. Ardie Savea 9. Cam Roigard 10. Beauden Barrett 11. Caleb Clarke 12. Anton Lienert-Brown 13. Rieko Ioane 14. Mark Tele'a 15. Will Jordan Bench: 16. Asafo Aumua 17. Ofa Tu'ungafasi 18. Fletcher Newell 19. Tupou Vaa'i 20. Peter Lakai 21. TJ Perenara 22. David Havili 23. Damian McKenzie Italy: 1. Danilo Fischetti 2. Gianmarco Lucchesi 3. Marco Riccioni 4. Federico Ruzza 5. Dino Lamb 6. Sebastian Negri 7. Manuel Zuliani 8. Ross Vintcent 9. Martin Page-Relo 10. Paolo Garbisi 11. Monty Ioane 12. Tommaso Menoncello 13. Juan Ignacio Brex (c) 14. Jacopo Trulla 15. Ange Capuozzo Bench: 16 Giacomo Nicotera, 17 Mirco Spagnolo 18 Simone Ferrari, 19 Niccolò Cannone, 20 Alessandro Izekor, 21 Alessandro Garbisi, 22 Leonardo Marin 23 Marco Zanon All Blacks selections: This is a very stacked All Blacks team, surprisingly so considering this is the last game of the tour and more than a few of these players are due for a rest. Ethan de Groot returns after being in the dog box for an off-field indiscretion, but the real reason he's back is because Tamaiti Williams is injured. Patrick Tuipulotu gets a start ahead of Tupou Vaa'i, while Cane returns to openside and in the backs Anton Lienert-Brown comes in for the injured Jordie Barrett. Peter Lakai retains his bench spot to back up the loosies, while David Havili gets his first run since the win over Japan. This selection really says a lot about how keen Robertson is to win and put on a good performance, however it's meant some of his squad members have seen very little game time on this tour. Italy selections: The big change for the Italians after their 2017 win over Georgia last weekend is the return of Ange Capuozzo. The young fullback is their best attacking weapon. Sebastian Negri is a hard ball carrier, but the real test will be on the tight five against a very well performed All Black set piece. Elsewhere Martin Page-Relo takes over at halfback inside Paolo Garbisi, if Italy get any sort of front foot ball it'll be up to them to make something happen. What they're saying: "The guys were desperately disappointed last week. We created so much, and the French just took a few opportunities - the game changed and we had our chances which we didn't take. We wanted to come up here and sweep the north. The margins are small, now we get a chance to finish properly." - All Blacks coach Scott Robertson. "We just want to end the year how we started. A win would be awesome but we're focused on the performance, that comes from a great week's preparation." - All Blacks centre Rieko Ioane. The last time they met: The score ended All Blacks 96 - 17 Italy the last time the sides faced off, at the 2023 Rugby World Cup. It seems crazy to think there were genuine fears that Italy would cause an upset and send the All Blacks tumbling out of last year's World Cup. All of that was answered in brutal fashion as they handed out a trademark All Black backlash, running in 12 tries and almost racking up a century. It says a lot that this wasn't even the record-winning score line between the two sides. What is going to happen: This will be one way traffic, unless the Italians can do what they did in 2010 and simply try to spoil everything so that the All Blacks can't string enough phases together. Even then, there is so much talent in this side it's likely that a negative gameplan will be overturned by set piece dominance. The main issue is likely to be the weather. It's been a while since the All Blacks have played in snow, and the conditions may affect what they want to do with the ball. This is the last test of the season, but also the last one for a couple of serious servants to the black jersey. Both Cane and Perenara will walk off the field having completed long and successful careers, so the motivation is there for their team mates to make sure it is a comfortable victory.The counting for the Irish General Election 2024 concluded on Monday evening, December 2, more than 72 hours after polls opened across Ireland on Friday, November 29. The top three parties are unchanged since Ireland’s last General Election, which was held in February 2020. Fianna Fáil has won 48 Dáil seats this time around, while Sinn Féin won 39 and Fine Gael won 38. Each of the top three parties also saw gains on 2020 - Fianna Fáil is up 10 seats, Sinn Féin is up two, and Fine Gael is up three. However, the number of seats in the Dáil Éireann has also increased since 2020, from 160 to 174. The number of constituencies also increased from 39 to 43. Sign up to IrishCentral's newsletter to stay up-to-date with everything Irish! With 174 seats up for grabs in this year's election, one party would have needed to win at least 88 seats to win the majority and thus control of the Dail. However, no one party fielded enough candidates in the Irish General Election 2024 to win the majority outright. As such, Ireland is likely heading for another coalition government, where parties come together as a bloc to reach the majority. The results of the Irish General Election 2020 also gave way to a three-way coalition between Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and The Green Party. Micheál Martin (Fianna Fáil), Leo Varadkar (Fine Gael), and Simon Harris (Fine Gael) all served as Taoiseach at different points during the outgoing Dáil. With a combined 86 seats, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael will likely be a part of Ireland's new coalition government. While on the campaign trail, the leaders of both parties vowed not to go into coalition with Sinn Féin. Meanwhile, Sinn Féin said earlier on Monday before counting was finalized that it was contacting the leaders of the Social Democrats, Labour, and "other progressive TDs and groupings this week." With a combined 61 seats, a Sinn Féin - Social Democrats - Labour coalition would need lots of support from other 'progressives' to reach a majority. As parties begin to contact each other in hopes of forming a majority-winning coalition, discussions will now turn to a timeline of when Ireland's next Government will be formed. TD Jack Chambers, Ireland's Minister for Finance, told RTÉ on Monday: “I don’t expect a government to be formed in mid-December, when the Dáil is due to meet on the 18th of December, probably a Ceann Comhairle (speaker) can be elected, and there’ll have to be time and space taken to make sure we can form a coherent, stable government. “I don’t think it should take five months like it did the last time – Covid obviously complicated that. "But I think all political parties need to take the time to see what’s possible and try and form a stable government for the Irish people.” Meanwhile, RTÉ News reports that Fianna Fáil won 21.9% of the first preference votes, followed by Fine Gael with 20.8%, and Sinn Féin with 19%. Voter turnout in the Irish General Election 2024 sunk to 59.7% from 62.9% in 2020. This year's election saw the lowest turnout since 1923, the last time the number was below 60%.Charles Schwab Investment Management Inc. raised its position in Innovative Industrial Properties, Inc. ( NYSE:IIPR – Free Report ) by 2.4% during the third quarter, according to the company in its most recent disclosure with the Securities & Exchange Commission. The firm owned 457,374 shares of the company’s stock after purchasing an additional 10,711 shares during the quarter. Charles Schwab Investment Management Inc.’s holdings in Innovative Industrial Properties were worth $61,563,000 as of its most recent SEC filing. A number of other large investors also recently added to or reduced their stakes in the company. USA Financial Formulas purchased a new stake in shares of Innovative Industrial Properties in the 3rd quarter valued at $25,000. Blue Trust Inc. grew its position in Innovative Industrial Properties by 2,085.7% in the 2nd quarter. Blue Trust Inc. now owns 459 shares of the company’s stock valued at $48,000 after acquiring an additional 438 shares in the last quarter. Signaturefd LLC increased its stake in Innovative Industrial Properties by 42.3% during the second quarter. Signaturefd LLC now owns 505 shares of the company’s stock worth $55,000 after purchasing an additional 150 shares during the period. Federated Hermes Inc. lifted its position in shares of Innovative Industrial Properties by 138.1% during the second quarter. Federated Hermes Inc. now owns 538 shares of the company’s stock worth $59,000 after purchasing an additional 312 shares in the last quarter. Finally, US Bancorp DE grew its holdings in shares of Innovative Industrial Properties by 75.3% in the third quarter. US Bancorp DE now owns 440 shares of the company’s stock valued at $59,000 after purchasing an additional 189 shares in the last quarter. 70.58% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors and hedge funds. Innovative Industrial Properties Price Performance Shares of IIPR opened at $109.17 on Friday. The firm has a market capitalization of $3.09 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 19.43 and a beta of 1.37. The firm’s fifty day simple moving average is $123.47 and its 200-day simple moving average is $118.63. Innovative Industrial Properties, Inc. has a twelve month low of $80.24 and a twelve month high of $138.35. The company has a current ratio of 11.53, a quick ratio of 11.53 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.15. Innovative Industrial Properties Dividend Announcement The firm also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Tuesday, October 15th. Shareholders of record on Monday, September 30th were given a dividend of $1.90 per share. This represents a $7.60 annualized dividend and a yield of 6.96%. The ex-dividend date was Monday, September 30th. Innovative Industrial Properties’s payout ratio is currently 135.23%. Wall Street Analyst Weigh In A number of equities research analysts have issued reports on the stock. Wolfe Research upgraded shares of Innovative Industrial Properties to a “hold” rating in a report on Monday, September 23rd. Compass Point upgraded Innovative Industrial Properties from a “neutral” rating to a “buy” rating and set a $125.00 price objective on the stock in a research note on Friday, November 8th. Piper Sandler lowered their target price on Innovative Industrial Properties from $120.00 to $118.00 and set a “neutral” rating for the company in a research note on Friday, November 8th. Finally, Roth Capital upgraded Innovative Industrial Properties to a “strong-buy” rating in a report on Monday, November 11th. Two analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating, two have assigned a buy rating and one has issued a strong buy rating to the company. According to MarketBeat.com, the company presently has a consensus rating of “Moderate Buy” and a consensus price target of $127.67. View Our Latest Research Report on IIPR Innovative Industrial Properties Company Profile ( Free Report ) Innovative Industrial Properties, Inc is a self-advised Maryland corporation focused on the acquisition, ownership and management of specialized properties leased to experienced, state-licensed operators for their regulated cannabis facilities. Innovative Industrial Properties, Inc has elected to be taxed as a real estate investment trust, commencing with the year ended December 31, 2017. Read More Want to see what other hedge funds are holding IIPR? Visit HoldingsChannel.com to get the latest 13F filings and insider trades for Innovative Industrial Properties, Inc. ( NYSE:IIPR – Free Report ). 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