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The Dystopian Lake Filled By the World's Tech Sludge
New submitter trevc sends this story from the BBC:
Hidden in an unknown corner of Inner Mongolia is a toxic, nightmarish lake created by our thirst for smartphones, consumer gadgets and green tech. The city-sized Baogang Steel and Rare Earth complex dominates the horizon, its endless cooling towers and chimneys reaching up into grey, washed-out sky. Stretching into the distance, lies an artificial lake filled with a black, barely-liquid, toxic sludge. ... You may not have heard of Baotou, but the mines and factories here help to keep our modern lives ticking. It is one of the world’s biggest suppliers of “rare earth” minerals. These elements can be found in everything from magnets in wind turbines and electric car motors, to the electronic guts of smartphones and flatscreen TVs.
Feeling fortunate that Mongolia is not in my backyard. From all of us Techies... Thank You Mongolia!
The Moto X was built in the US, I recall reading somewhere that it cost around $2 more to assemble in the US. I would assume however that the parts were not manufactured in the US, but I could be wrong.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Rare earth minerals actually aren't rare and we have tons of proven reserves. We just stopped because it's a dirty business.
Posting AC, as I'm too lazy to log in.
A few years ago, I was looking to build a project. I found out there were two tiers:
Built it up to high standards: The US, Russia, Germany, Japan, Sweden, the UK, China, Canada, and many other countries could build what I needed to a top spec.
Build it cheap: China could undercut everyone, and could offer bargain basement specs turned into bargain basement products with canned ass for quality.
What I ended up doing, after looking for manufacturing the world over is finding a place that could do what I wanted... all within 50 miles (~80 km) of where I lived. Since prices were almost identical across the board, I just went with local factories to crank the thing out for sale.
tl;dr, if you want it cheap, China is your go to guy. If you want it done right, the entire world can do it.
The only exception to this was a type of mechanical security piece which had to be milled in Switzerland due to the insanely high tolerances required. I later replaced the proprietary key assembly with an Abloy PROTEC2 cam lock and key switch [1].
[1]: Security is something to be taken seriously. Yes, someone can wrench their way in by force, but it leaves an obvious signature... if a lock gets picked, there is little to no proof of intrusion, so I use top tier locks to do the job right. In the late 1980s, and early 1990s, many data center appliances used Medeco or other high security brands. Now, if I see a lock on something, it likely is a CH751 lock or something just as shitty.
Every form of energy has an environmental cost, the cost of making windmills and solar panels are mostly hidden in China, so Al Gore and his buddies can pretend that the cost doesn't exist.
That would be a great argument except the majority of wind turbines used in the US are also made in the the US these days and the plenty are exported as well.
I bet there are other toxic lakes just outside the processing plants that make solar panels too, since China currently doesn't care much about pollution.
I've been to China. They care about the pollution plenty. They also care about trying raise hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. You think doing that while protecting the environment is an easy thing to do? It's easy to sit in the cheap seats and decry what they are doing but claiming they don't care is simply not fair or true.
The motors and battery (which needs to be replaced every X years) for your new Prius are not so great for the environment.
The motors last forever if they are properly constructed. The battery is a prime target for recycling, because it's a lot cheaper to "mine" the battery for metals than digging them out of the ground. Whether the original mining is bad for the environment depends on whether people care about it or not. Making such a toxic lake is not a requirement, it's just cheaper. But if people no longer accept it, it's possible to make a clean factory.
When it comes to manufacturing costs, businesses can be surprisingly penny wise and pound foolish. A company I used to work for produced a $2500 device that ended up having a high defect rate due to not being willing to spend 11 cents on the lining which engineering told them they needed to prevent the exact problem they encountered. Naturally the solution was to fire engineering for their horrible mistake and then move those tasks to a manufacturing company in China.