Maybe you're lying on your couch right now, flipping through seed catalogs and wondering when the guy who plows your driveway is going to arrive. You close your eyes and recall what it was like in July when your vegetable plot was at peak production. You may have some pots of herbs—rosemary, sage, chives or oregano—in a sunny south-facing window, available to pluck and drop into that hearty stew or hot stew or even a planter of salad greens, one of the easiest things to grow indoors.
But how nice would it be to have a little indoor farm, full of the types of healthy plant foods you spoil yourself with in the summer? You might even be tempted to eat a little better, reaching for a veggie bursting with vitamins and minerals instead of a bowl of macaroni and cheese. With a little loving care you can have a variety of fresh produce as close as your front room. Some of these will require taking the next step up to grow lights even if you have sunny windows—some require longer daylight hours than you'll have in February. But you don't have to buy an expensive system. A trip to the hardware store will get you what you need— some full-range fluorescent lamps and inexpensive holders and stands should do it.
1. Radishes are easy to grow from seed and provide quick gratification, with some varieties ready to harvest in as little as a month, the longest taking about two months. That's why they're often used in classrooms to demonstrate to children how vegetables are grown. They don't require particularly deep soil but it should be well-drained. And these days, radish seed is available in a profusion of colors and shapes that make the plain old round, red ones look ordinary. Experiment with white, purple, green, black and even multicolored ones.
2. Carrots can require a very deep planter because they have such long roots, and they need a soil loose enough to burrow through. But you can make it easier to grow them by choosing a shorter, fatter variety and or smaller type that requires less depth to grow. Try a baby carrot variety like Caracas that only grows to around 3 or 4 inches or the round Atlas that looks sort of like an orange radish. Baby varieties are quick growers too, usually maturing in less than two months.
3. Since mushrooms like cool, dark, moist places, they're ideal to grow inside in the winter. You don't have to worry about limited daylight, and they'll love it in your basement. The easiest way to grow them is to purchase a kit that has everything you need. It will have the correct growing medium for the type of mushroom spawn—the equivalent of seed—it contains. You just follow the directions, doing little more than keeping it watered. Since you'll have mushrooms in a couple of weeks, this is another fun project for impatient kids.
4. Scallions aka green onions can be grown right from the bunch you bought at the supermarket. Take the bottoms—the white bulb part—and bunch them together with a tie or a rubber band and just put them in a glass with about an inch of water. Change the water daily and a little more than a week when new shoots start to appear, plant them in a pot of soil. You can cut as much of the green shoots as you need while they continue to grow.
5. Many garden centers and plant catalogs sell dwarf citrus trees like lemon, lime and tangerine trees in pots, ready to set out on your porch or patio in the summer or in a sunny alcove in your house in the winter to fill your house with their bright, tart fragrances. Think of them as large houseplants, ranging in size from 3 to 4 feet wide and tall. They'll need as much light as possible, and if you want fruit immediately, buy a plant that's already a couple of years old. You can enjoy their tropical fruit all winter.
6. Tumeric and ginger are two plants whose underground rhizomes are harvested for their superfood health-giving properties, almost too numerous to mention. Both can flourish indoors in pots and, like the citrus plants, be put outside in the summer. You can start to grow them by planting a store-bought chunk of rhizome that has growth buds on it. They like it warm and moist and can be started indoors or out, but won't survive in harsh winter conditions. Both are also available as plants from more cutting-edge garden centers.
7. Tomatoes are a little more challenging to grow indoors than some of these other things, but eating a fresh tomato in the middle of the winter is like having a burst of summer in your mouth. Go with a small-fruited variety—a grape, pear or cherry type that sets its fruit more quickly than the bigger ones. They will need large pots and lots of daylight—this is where grow lights become essential with two lights per plant. Turn them on and off to simulate daylight conditions in the summer when they're at their peak. Sure, it's a little extra trouble, but the result is surely worth it.
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Though made in large part of plastic, glass, ceramics, gold and copper, they also contain critical resources. The gallium used for LEDs and the camera flash, the tantalum in capacitors and indium that powers the display were all pulled from the ground — at a price for nature and people.
"Mining raw materials is always problematic, both with regard to human rights and ecology," said Melanie Müller, raw materials expert of the German think tank SWP. "Their production process is pretty toxic."
The gallium and indium in many phones comes from China or South Korea, the tantalum from the Democratic Republic of Congo or Rwanda. All in, such materials comprise less than ten grams of a phone's weight. But these grams finance an international mining industry that causes radioactive earth dumps, poisoned groundwater and Indigenous population displacement.
Environmental Damage: 'Nature Has Been Overexploited'
The problem is that modern technologies don't work without what are known as critical raw materials. Collectively, solar panels, drones, 3D printers and smartphone contain as many as 30 of these different elements sourced from around the globe. A prime example is lithium from Chile, which is essential in the manufacture of batteries for electric vehicles.
"No one, not even within the industry, would deny that mining lithium causes enormous environmental damage," Müller explained, in reference to the artificial lakes companies create when flushing the metal out of underground brine reservoirs. "The process uses vast amounts of water, so you end up with these huge flooded areas where the lithium settles."
This means of extraction results in the destruction and contamination of the natural water system. Unique plants and animals lose access to groundwater and watering holes. There have also been reports of freshwater becoming salinated due to extensive acidic waste water during lithium mining.
But lithium is not the only raw material that causes damage. Securing just one ton of rare earth elements produces 2,000 tons of toxic waste, and has devastated large regions of China, said Günther Hilpert, head of the Asia Research Division of the German think tank SWP.
He says companies there have adopted a process of spraying acid over the mining areas in order to separate the rare earths from other ores, and that mined areas are often abandoned after excavation.
"They are no longer viable for agricultural use," Hilpert said. "Nature has been overexploited."
China is not the only country with low environmental mining standards and poor resource governance. In Madagascar, for example, a thriving illegal gem and metal mining sector has been linked to rainforest depletion and destruction of natural lemur habitats.
States like Madagascar, Rwanda and the DRC score poorly on the Environmental Performance Index that ranks 180 countries for their effort on factors including conservation, air quality, waste management and emissions. Environmentalists are therefore particularly concerned that these countries are mining highly toxic materials like beryllium, tantalum and cobalt.
But it is not only nature that suffers from the extraction of high-demand critical raw materials.
"It is a dirty, toxic, partly radioactive industry," Hilpert said. "China, for example, has never really cared about human rights when it comes to achieving production targets."
Dirty, Toxic, Radioactive: Working in the Mining Sector
One of the most extreme examples is Baotou, a Chinese city in Inner Mongolia, where rare earth mining poisoned surrounding farms and nearby villages, causing thousands of people to leave the area.
In 2012, The Guardian described a toxic lake created in conjunction with rare earth mining as "a murky expanse of water, in which no fish or algae can survive. The shore is coated with a black crust, so thick you can walk on it. Into this huge, 10 sq km tailings pond nearby factories discharge water loaded with chemicals used to process the 17 most sought after minerals in the world."
Local residents reported health issues including aching legs, diabetes, osteoporosis and chest problems, The Guardian wrote.
South Africa has also been held up for turning a blind eye to the health impacts of mining.
"The platinum sector in South Africa has been criticized for performing very poorly on human rights — even within the raw materials sector," Müller said.
In 2012, security forces killed 34 miners who had been protesting poor working conditions and low wages at a mine owned by the British company Lonmin. What became known as the "Marikana massacre" triggered several spontaneous strikes across the country's mining sector.
Müller says miners can still face exposure to acid drainage — a frequent byproduct of platinum mining — that can cause chemical burns and severe lung damage. Though this can be prevented by a careful waste system.
Some progress was made in 2016 when the South African government announced plans to make mining companies pay $800 million (€679 million) for recycling acid mine water. But they didn't all comply. In 2020, activists sued Australian-owned mining company Mintails and the government to cover the cost of environmental cleanup.
Another massive issue around mining is water consumption. Since the extraction of critical raw materials is very water intensive, drought prone countries such as South Africa, have witnessed an increase in conflicts over supply.
For years, industry, government and the South African public debated – without a clear agreement – whether companies should get privileged access to water and how much the population may suffer from shortages.
Mining in Brazil: Replacing Nature, People, Land Rights
Beyond the direct health and environmental impact of mining toxic substances, quarrying critical raw materials destroys livelihoods, as developments in Brazil demonstrate.
"Brazil is the major worldwide niobium producer and reserves in [the state of] Minas Gerais would last more than 200 years [at the current rate of demand]," said Juliana Siqueira-Gay, environmental engineer and Ph.D. student at the University of São Paulo.
While the overall number of niobium mining requests is stagnating, the share of claims for Indigenous land has skyrocketed from 3 to 36 percent within one year. If granted, 23 percent of the Amazon forest and the homeland of 222 Indigenous groups could fall victim to deforestation in the name of mining, a study by Siqueira-Gay finds.
In early 2020, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro signed a bill which would allow corporations to develop areas populated by Indigenous communities in the future. The law has not yet entered into force, but "this policy could have long-lasting negative effects on Brazil's socio-biodiversity," said Siqueira-Gay.
One example are the niobium reserves in Seis Lagos, in Brazil's northeast, which could be quarried to build electrolytic capacitors for smartphones.
"They overlap the Balaio Indigenous land and it would cause major impacts in Indigenous communities by clearing forests responsible for providing food, raw materials and regulating the local climate," Siqueira-Gay explained.
She says scientific good practice guidelines offer a blueprint for sustainable mining that adheres to human rights and protects forests. Quarries in South America — and especially Brazil — funded by multilaterial banks like the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank Group have to follow these guidelines, Siqueira-Gay said.
They force companies to develop sustainable water supply, minimize acid exposure and re-vegetate mined surfaces. "First, negative impacts must be avoided, then minimized and at last compensated — not the other way around."
Reposted with permission from DW.