Environmental, health and social acceptability issues associated with rare earth elements: a systematic literature review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The extraction of rare earth elements (REE) often raises environmental and health concerns due to the associated radioactivity and the acidification required to process these elements, thus affecting the social acceptability of REE projects. This review examines how social acceptability influences the mining sector and identifies the key factors that shape its acceptance by society. Guided by the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) framework, this study selected 120 relevant documents from the period 2000 to 2025 and analyzed them through an in-depth narrative approach. The analysis of the documents reveals a notable increase in publications on REE with a peak in 2016 (12 studies) with a predominance of research in America (45.45%), especially in Quebec (23.64%). In terms of impact, the study notes an emphasis on environmental and health risks related to their radioactivity, ecotoxicity and the acidity of the residues, with considerable effects on ecosystems. Furthermore, the study identifies eight key factors that influence the social acceptability of REE projects. These factors are: (1) community participation in decision-making; (2) trust; (3) socio-economic, territorial, and geographical contexts; (4) local knowledge and expertise; (5) values, beliefs, and expectations; (6) real or perceived risks and uncertainties; (7) impacts on the living environment; and (8) benefits and spin-offs for local communities. These interrelated and non-exhaustive factors vary in importance depending on the specific context in which the project is implemented, such as the country or region.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.023 | 0.091 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.017 | 0.015 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".