Waste not, want not: Materialities, identity, and politics in Zambia's ‘Black Mountains’

This paper explores the political economy of mining waste, a new frontier for critical minerals emerging across Southern Africa. Focusing on the materialities of Zambia's ‘Black Mountains’, copper and cobalt-bearing waste dumps created through a century of mining in the Copperbelt, it demonstrates how rising commodity prices, technological changes in mineral processing, and the growing strategic importance of critical minerals have transformed mining waste from environmental liability into a new frontier of extraction. It argues that the materialities of mining waste, including visibility, accessibility, and ease of extraction, have made copper a ‘semi-lootable’ resource, encouraging both illegal extraction and engagement with relevant government authorities at the same time. In turn, this has shaped both artisanal mining practices and wider struggles over ownership, legality, and control, resulting in fluid political identities for artisanal miners, known as jerabos (jail-boys), who were alternately criminalised, legitimised as small-scale miners, and then criminalised again as governments changed and political incentives shifted. Drawing on interviews, field observation, and documentary research, the paper demonstrates that the legality and social meaning of artisanal mining are not fixed, but contingent on changing political and economic conditions. Through this, Zambia's Black Mountains have become simultaneously areas of economic hope and prosperity; lawlessness and disorder; and sites of political and economic opportunity. This case demonstrates how waste mining is reshaping patterns of accumulation and exclusion, while illuminating broader governance challenges likely to accompany the expansion of waste reprocessing across Africa's emerging critical minerals economy.