Thanks to the Internet, we can all see photos of Bolivia’s beautiful Uyuni Salt Flats. But few of us will actually make the trek there, and fewer still will get to spend a night in the Palacio de Sal. Yet there is a third element of Uyuni that potentially affects each and every one of us reading this, whether product designer or consumer, and it’s what’s under Uyuni: Lithium. Lots of it.
If you break through the salt crust of the massive Uyuni—which at nearly 5,000 square miles is some 25 times the size of America’s Bonneville salt flats—you’ll find an enormous brine lake. Bolivia is home to nearly half the world’s supply of lithium, and most of Bolivia’s supply is floating around in that brine lake. We’re talking an estimated five million tons.
Lithium-ion and lithium-polymer batteries are currently a huge business, powering everything from cars to laptops to cell phones. It’s conceivable that if the massive amounts of lithium were extracted from Uyuni, the prices of everything from Priuses to pacemakers, from ThinkPads to iPads, would drop. And relatively impoverished Bolivia could become rich in the process.
“We know that Bolivia can become the Saudi Arabia of lithium,” activist and salt gatherer Francisco Quisbert told the New York Times in 2009. But as he insightfully added, “We are poor, but we are not stupid peasants.”
Evo Morales, the political activist who has held Bolivia’s presidency since 2006, is a man of the people and a champion of the poor. Despite entreaties from the likes of Mitsubishi—who estimates demand for lithium will increase five-fold in the near future, even for a tiny niche market, and that Bolivia’s Uyuni holds the key to keeping it affordable—and other international conglomerates, Morales has been resistant to opening Uyuni’s floodgates to foreigners. (American companies have reportedly been ordered by Washington to stay out of the wooing process due to political tensions.)
The big question is, when Bolivia needs the cash and these companies have the cash, Why?
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