Beneath Bolivia's Salt Flats: Lithium Wealth

Horizon
For decades the salt flats have simply been a curiosity for adventure travelers who come by the tens of thousand each year, and a source of subsistence for impoverished salt gatherers who scrape mounds of salt and sell it as table salt. The production of lithum, which requires months of slow evaporation and weeks of refining in a lab, could transform the salt flats into the economic engine of Bolivia.

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