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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.
who cares what happens on Giedi Prime as long as the spice flows.
Sounds like an objectivist utopia
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.
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.
Republicans:
1) abolish EPA
2) Profit!!
3) Giant lakes of goo
Let us know when you start planning ahead
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.
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.
Feeling fortunate that Mongolia is not in my backyard. From all of us Techies... Thank You Mongolia!
This story is about China, not Mongolia. "Outer Mongolia" is the country of Mongolia. "Inner Mongolia" is a region of China, which has about eight times as many ethnic Mongolians as Mongolia does.
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.
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.
"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.
In China's defense, they did post clearly marked "No Swimming" signs.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
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.
The problem tends to be that the people who make the decisions get enough cash out of it to live elsewhere.
Last I saw, Apple and it's leadership are heavily Democratic, not Republican.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
In the future they will mine this like for the vast resources it contains. Just like landfills. Trash to treasures.
Kudos to the author for including a google maps link. All news stories should do that now.
If you look south of the sludge pond you can see what looks like an older sludge pond that is being processed. Yes, it's nasty and dangerous and definitely should be contained, but isn't that what sludge ponds are for? To keep all that nasty stuff contained for later processing.