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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.
No, just China. Don't confuse global trade for local environmental laws or the lack thereof.
who cares what happens on Giedi Prime as long as the spice flows.
Sounds like an objectivist utopia
If they want to create the next superfund site to sell a few phones, that's their decision and they (and their children) will have to life with it. Nature has a way of cleaning up such things over time.
You may not have heard of Baotou, but the mines and factories here help to keep our modern lives ticking.
We're able to produce most of what we use, including rare earth minerals, without creating toxic sludge lakes. The only reason we send all of these industries to China is to because their lax environmental and labor laws allow cheaper production, and thus higher profit margins.
Our modern lives don't depend on utterly fucking up our environment, but ridiculous executive pay and concentration of wealth at the top benefit greatly from it. Studies (which I'm too lazy to look up, but I'm sure others can find easily) show that it doesn't cost that much more to make goods in the US and Europe, labor and environmental regulations and all. The outsourcing of manufacturing hasn't even significantly dropped retail prices much, though profit margins (and net profits) are at record highs across most industries.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Feeling fortunate that Mongolia is not in my backyard. From all of us Techies... Thank You Mongolia!
Move along! Move along! Could I interest you in yet another incremental improvement in technology?
The author makes a good point: we shouldn't be treating gadgets as disposable.
Where the article fails is the implication (intentional or not) that "green" tech is creating some new problem that didn't exist before. Every hard rock mining operation no matter the purpose (INCLUDING some mining operations that extract oil from tar sands) produces toxic chemical laced by-products that must be dealt with (frequently by putting them in tailings ponds).
We outsourced our jobs and our pollution.
Table-ized A.I.
According to Google Maps, Baotou, Inner Mongolia, has one fairly small sludge pond from which carefully posed hysterical pictures are taken for the referenced article, while the remainder of the city appears quite nice. So once again we find that we have here just another over-hyped fictional story from the evil media.
Windmills may or may not be better for the environment than nuke power, but the places you can put a nuke power station are more limited compared to where you can put a windmill.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Republicans:
1) abolish EPA
2) Profit!!
3) Giant lakes of goo
Let us know when you start planning ahead
the prices for their rare-earth mineral exports. You can sit there and shake your head all you want, but the fact is that you're burning through smart-phones like an idiot, in an attempt to let everyone know you always got the latest stuff, and you get to do it at a lower price just because China takes the hit of this environmental disaster.
If we (and by 'we' I mean places like California) were really concerned with the global environment, we'd open our own rare earth mines and processing facilities. So the EPA could keep a closer eye on them and they could be run under tighter regulations. Or at a minimum, pass one of those state laws prohibiting technologies based on polluting industries. So let's see them give up iPads, Teslas, wind and solar power and all those other 'filthy' products.
Have gnu, will travel.
Who knew there were Rs in Mongolia?
Same goes for windmills, etc. Are they really better for the environment than, say, nuclear power?
Uranium has to be mined (most likely using similar circumstances) as well. Most everything that we use and dispose of has an environmental impact.
The real point of this is the fact that China doesn't have better environmental protection laws. The US had issues like this up until the states and the EPA began to regulate environmental impacts. The Cuyahoga River fire was a good example of why we began to clean up our act in the US.
But the reason that I quoted that line is because windmills, solar, nuclear and geothermal are good sources of electricity that our going to lower CO2 emissions and hopefully slow the human environmental impact on the world. All of these can cause a negative environmental impact, if done in an unregulated environment, but they can all hopefully improve the environment as well.
...That was not in the ore taken out of the ground in the first place?
I buy a new phone about every 3 years, when my previous one is worn out. Most people do this every year or two. What a waste...This article shows what you're missing when you sign that lease, or buy that new iPhone.
I replace mine with about the same frequency. Not to toot Apple's horn but they have trade in programs which reduce the cost of the new phone and they refurbish or recycle the old one. Many people will hand their phones down, too. Often the only thing that the handsets really need is a battery.
The motors and battery (which needs to be replaced every X years) for your new Prius are not so great for the environment. Sure, it makes you feel good to not fill up at the gas pump, but what is the true environmental cost of that car?
One argument that can be made is efficiency, is it more efficient to tap the grid vs generating energy at home? Is less fuel consumption beneficial? Here's a Forbes article about Prius, having a battery replaced with a refurbished one from a 3rd party.
The reality is that there are 28 separate cells in the hybrid battery pack. When the unit starts to fail, only a handful of the individual cells are bad. What Prius Battery Repair of Houston does, and Toyota could do if it wanted to, is replace the bad hybrid battery pack with a reconditioned one to get the customer back on the road. Then, determine which cells are bad, and simply replace the bad battery cells, recondition the battery, and sell it to the next customer.
Same goes for windmills, etc. Are they really better for the environment than, say, nuclear power?
Better is so subjective. Replace windmills with $anyitem (minifridge, dams, coal power plants). Does it make it more or less profound?
I'm glad someone out there is forcing us to look at the downside of all of the technology we use. Kudos to them for doing it.
Forcing? Hardly. This is the byproduct of cheap.
I'd say this article just focuses on an admittedly bad area where stuff is done cheaply because that's what many people want world wide. A rare earth mine is ramping up production in California. Compare how it's done. It lowered capacity because of cost, a re-occuring theme with a lot of American industry.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
We're able to produce most of what we use, including rare earth minerals, without creating toxic sludge lakes. The only reason we send all of these industries to China is to because their lax environmental and labor laws allow cheaper production, and thus higher profit margins.
Not correct, or at least not completely true. The primary reason China has captured a lot of manufacturing business is because they have a large supply of cheap labor. And most of the reason it is cheap is precisely because the supply is so large - economics 101 stuff. Lots of laborers competing for jobs keeps wages suppressed. You are correct however that lax environmental policies do play a role in some industries as well. Stuff like glass, steel, etc can be pretty rough on the environment and not having to pay for these externalities can be a competitive advantage. China doesn't have a bad pollution problem just by coincidence. That is the result of decades of sacrificing the environment to boost wages and build industry. (It also has a lot to do with the number of dirty coal fired power plants they use)
Studies (which I'm too lazy to look up, but I'm sure others can find easily) show that it doesn't cost that much more to make goods in the US and Europe, labor and environmental regulations and all.
Depends strongly on what exactly you are producing. I run a manufacturing company. Whether something costs more to make in China versus the US depends primarily on the labor content of what is being produced. Labor intensive goods tend to get produced in low labor cost countries. Capital intensive goods tend to get produced in capital efficient (usually high labor cost) countries. It's obviously not quite that simple but it's a good first approximation. Stuff that can be automated or which has a lot of IP content tends to stay domestic. Stuff that requires the lowest possible labor costs tends to migrate elsewhere.
The outsourcing of manufacturing hasn't even significantly dropped retail prices much, though profit margins (and net profits) are at record highs across most industries.
Hasn't dropped retail prices much? A quick trip through Walmart should disabuse you of that notion. I've quoted jobs for stuff that is sold through Walmart. The target prices sometimes were below our cost of materials. Much of that cost savings is being passed on precisely because that is Walmart's business model - to be a price leader you have to pass on savings to customers or someone else will. If you think manufacturers are keeping all those profits from offshoring then you are very, very mistaken.
Profit margins are sometimes higher on domestically manufactured goods because of selection bias. The companies that are left are generally those which are not in labor intensive industries where offshoring makes sense due to intense price competition. The ones that are left are those that can for one reason or another protect their margins. Sometimes through IP, sometimes through capital efficiency, sometimes through automation, sometimes due to customer requirements, sometimes due to regulations. The US manufacturing sector is roughly the same size as China's when measured in dollars so plenty of stuff gets made here. Just not your McDonalds happy meal toys.
It is also a lot easier and cheaper to recycle the batteries for an electric car than mine for all new materials. Those worn out battery packs are far from a complete loss. And while an electric motor may wear out it's likely that the rare earth parts can be re-used as the just don't wear out.
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.
I've never heard of Dystopium before and there is a lake full of it?
love is just extroverted narcissism
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.
The lake wasn't filled by our demand for gadgets, it was filled by Baotou, and the Chinese government allowed them to do it.
"I've always been concerned about people who can't see the negative side of all the "green", modern technologies today."
And I've found such people exist primarily in the imaginations of the people who complain about them.(I'll concede there may be some exceptions, see Einstein and the limits of human stupidity) Look, anyone with grey cells knows that windmills don't magically spring up from the ground, they have to be manufactured, and manufacturing creates pollution, especially in countries that find it inconvenient to regulate it. The question isn't "are windmills perfect?", it's "Do windmills have a smaller carbon/environmental footprint than using coal to create the same amount of power?" The consensus seems to be yes, they do.
As for the Prius, its environmental impact has been debated to death and yes, it is greener than your pickup.
Finally, "green" and "modern technologies" aren't equivalent. I'm pretty sure the president of Exxon Mobil owns a cell phone, and just as sure he couldn't give two farts about being green. The fact that tech creates pollution is not a blanket indictment of green tech. I do agree that replacing your phone every two years is wasteful, it would be nice if phone carriers provided an incentive to keep your old phone instead of the 2-year churn. They may be getting there, when my two years with AT&T was up I got a new contract that gave me a break for using my old phone.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
AKA "mud"
artificial lake
As in, this is exactly what the lake exists for. A reservoir of sorts for slurry and other runoff from industrial processes is common the WORLD OVER.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Since the rare earth processing plants are there, and since they dump into the lake, the question is, is that where they put the thorium?
Rare earths (not rare at all) always come complete with thorium. The problem with producing rare earths in the USA isn't the rareness, it's the waste disposal of the thorium residues. Nobody in the US will buy or store thorium. Thus it must be branded as a waste product, and disposing of a radioactive waste product is insanely expensive if it is possible at all.
So is the sludge lake also a glow-in-the-dark lake?
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
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People in the US are living quite a long time. Record lifespans, and they were born and lived when lead, asbestos, smog, toxic waste, and fairly rampant nuclear testing and fallout were common across the states.
At some level, the green hysteria industry seems to thrive less on identifying real problems and solutions, and more on agitating and frightening people. Click bait. The medical industry has identified stress as a contributor to heart disease. It might not be a good idea to spew streams of profound negativity to people.
And the jurisdiction issues. People in Asia are likely more interested in jobs and feeding their family, not what some green hysteria, latte sipping, urban dweller in one of America's concrete jungles has to say about their country, policies, or industries.
That's all well and good, but we don't [yet] live in the world where everyone is *choosing* to make that clean factory, although the vast majority of Americans seem to think that all of these technologies come from it.
At least you accept and understand the situation. My point is that the vast majority of people don't, and that's why I'm glad to see an article like this.
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I don't get why batteries that are not readily removable Are branded as "non-replaceable" All it takes if a little work and the proper tools and these batteries can be replaced at home, by the consumer. The same thing could be said of automobile batteries.
Now only if there were service offerings where you could have someone replace the battery on your iPad. Some of which can do it while you wait for 5 - 10 minutes.
If only.
But that still won't stop people from bitching I suppose.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
The article this post links too is a bit misleading. Read it, was horrified by it, decided to go and look around on Google Maps myself. The city of Baotou does not have pipes all over the streets as the article stated. The streets are wide, paved, full of cars. The city looks pretty decent actually. If you could remove the massive polluting factories on the Western edge of the city, it would probably be pretty nice actually. It is only when you cross the canal into the industrial complex itself that the pipes and crap all start appearing. The article made it sound like the whole city was overrun with industrial piping and smoke stacks. It isn't. At all. They also made the lake sound like some gigantic monster of a lake. It also isn't. It isn't tiny, by any means, but to say it stretched to the horizon is literary hyperbole. Standing on the shore of any lake it stretches to the horizon. NW to SE it is about 2500ft, and NE to SW it is probably a mile. That's not to say that this place isn't an absolute mess. It is. The industrial complex is massive. The main portion is at least 5 miles N to S. It is a Gordian knot of factories and conduits and walkways. And the air in the entire region must indeed be foul beyond words. But the residents of the city aren't living in the middle of the industrial complex as the article made it feel. And the lake itself is far smaller than described and is surrounded by all the factories and plants, not out in the open in farmland as the article again made it seem. It may once have been farmland, but it is all surrounded by industrial complexes now. This is probably the superfund site to end all superfund sites, but they exaggerated quite a bit writing that article.
This is a massively underrated comment.
it has people on it.
It killed Tasha Yar.
Also is it just me, or are there a suspicious number of ACs chiming in about how there is only a really tiny sludge lake and Baotou is in fact wonderful? Because I looked on Google maps, there was pretty big sludge lake and the place looks pretty dismal.
Last I saw, Apple and it's leadership are heavily Democratic, not Republican.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Holy shit. Russia wins by a mile.
In the future they will mine this like for the vast resources it contains. Just like landfills. Trash to treasures.
It'll be a lot cheaper to take your iPad in and get its battery replaced than to get a new one. Any Apple store should be able to do that for you, and there's got to be other places if one is inconvenient.
Having the battery not be user-replaceable allows a lot of changes that keep the iPad thinner and lighter and give better battery life. It's a tradeoff.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Why should they? We can barely effect the political climate in Mongolia, and the alternative winds up with us wiping out their economy anyway.
"Uranium has to be mined (most likely using similar circumstances) as well. Most everything that we use and dispose of has an environmental impact."
Thorium is currently a noxious byproduct of rare earth mining and the biggest dry toxic component of the tailings by volume. Make it valuable and 90% of the problem would be cleaned up overnight.
Give it a couple of million years and people will be clamouring for this stuff. (For values of "people" including small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri and other galactic residents.)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"