Ambitious technology to destroy the environment in China

The exploitation of rare earth metals with high applicability in China is being exchanged with heavy environmental pollution.

Heavy pollution in China

Baotou is the largest industrial city in Inner Mongolia, with large reserves of rare earth. Here, Bayan Obo mine alone accounts for 70% of global reserves. Thanks to this advantage, China becomes the world's number one supplier of rare earth and rare earth metals.

One of the many exhaust pipes is discharging directly into the reservoir.(Photo: Liam Young)

According to 2009 statistics, China provides about 95% of global rare earth demand . This is considered an important factor helping China's economy to have a leap forward in recent decades. Rare earths are mined in the Steel Complex and Rare Earth Baogang. The cooling tower and skyscrapers are a prominent feature of the panoramic view of Baotou city.

Special, rare earth elements such as cerium and neodymium, are highly applicable materials. This is an indispensable ingredient in most modern equipment, such as making magnets in wind turbines and electric cars, phone headsets and computer hard drives, flat-screen TVs.

The concentration of rare earth mining increases population in Baotou City. In just 65 years, since 1950, the city's population has increased from 97,000 to 2.5 million people. In addition to this impact, ore mining is causing serious pollution. Baogang Complex must build an artificial reservoir to discharge waste.

In industrial parks and in Baotou City, coal dust is everywhere because coal trucks run continuously . When it rains, the roads are submerged in black water due to coal dust, while the smell of sulfur is always strong. Along roads and sidewalks, waste pipelines discharge directly into artificial reservoirs that lie beneath the ground, even crossing the road.

Workers in an MP3 player factory.(Photo: Kate Davies)

Cerium is processed from mined ore and dissolved in sulfuric and nitric acids. When implementing a large-scale process, the amount of hazardous waste discharged will be huge.

Because the environment is so toxic that humans cannot live, the reservoir's vicinity has been abandoned . " I have never seen anything like this terrible. This must be an alien environment. "It is not human. Everywhere is a thick and black toxic sludge , " said Tim Maughan, who conducted the investigative report.

According to Maughan, this is not only a byproduct of the process of making electronic devices, but also from "environmentally friendly" technologies such as electric cars or wind turbines. When examining some waste samples, Maughan's investigation team found that the investigation team also took some samples of the waste to test, the results showed that the clay in the lake was three times more toxic than the picture. background radiation.