Hmm interesting ... I'm wondering what the future will be for...

Hmm interesting ... I'm wondering what the future will be for lithium brine extraction from the Salt Flats of Latin America's " lithium triangle" and how this will make AVZ a favourable global supplier with it's DRC Manono mega untapped resource of Lithium spodumene

BMW are doing an assessment/study on the environmental/social sustainability/impact of lithium brine extraction on the water in Argentina Chile Bolivia mining jurisdictions

" A dangerous game

While lithium is an increasingly popular material the world over, accessible high-quality ore deposits are limited to a select Andean countries – such as Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile. Current extraction methods in these regions have water at the heart of the process as the mineral is found dissolved in salt flats, requiring evaporation to be separated. This is opposed to methods used somewhere like Australia, which obtains lithium from ore mining.

Dissent over evaporation processes have been rumbling for years, and many are saying operations have directly triggered a water crisis. The San Cristóbal Mine in Bolivia, said to use 50,000 litres of water per day, has even been labeled an ‘environmental and social disaster’, while the Mexican state of Sonora (where lithium deposits have recently been discovered) is similarly in crisis mode, ranked by the World Resources Institute as having ‘Extremely High Baseline Water Stress’.

Ana Carballo, a research fellow on mining and society investigating lithium mines in Argentina, says the situation is a complex one – the product of political, social, and environmental factors – and is not one with a direct solution.

“Severe water scarcity means the ecosystems in these areas are very fragile – the water is not always reachable or readily available,” she says. “It’s taken a very long time to come to terms with the consequences of the mining processes and one of the main challenges is in getting adequate environmental impact assessments. "