A startup venture in New Zealand has discovered a way to extract critical battery minerals from rocks piled up as waste in mining operations.

Olivine is of little value beyond a smattering of niche uses like the semi-precious peridot production, sauna rocks in Finnish saunas, and a substitute for dolomite in steel works.

Aspiring Materials , however, has identified this silicate as a font of nickel-manganese-cobalt hydroxide, a component that’s used in high-density lithium ion batteries needed all over the world for electric vehicles, power tools, and energy storage solutions.

Cobalt is almost exclusively mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where issues such as violence, slavery, and human rights abuses have been well-documented. Nickel is produced mostly in Indonesia, and m

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