ninme

Lovely.

The Sunday Times – Chinese pay toxic price for a green world

Just outside the heavily polluted industrial city of Baotou, Inner Mongolia, surrounded by smokestacks, lies a lake with no name.

At this time of year the lake bed freezes into waves of solid mud. In summer, locals say, it oozes a viscous, red liquid. It is a “tailing lake”, where toxic rare earth elements from a mine 100 miles away are stored for further processing.

Seepage from the lake has poisoned the surrounding farmland. “The crops stopped growing after being watered in these fields,” said Wang Cun Gang, a farmer. The local council paid villagers compensation for loss of income. “They tested our water and concluded that neither people nor animals should drink it, nor is it usable for irrigation.”

This is the price Chinese peasants are paying for the low carbon future. Rare earths, a class of metallic elements that are highly reactive, are essential for the next generation of “green” technologies. The battery in a Toyota Prius car contains more than 22lb of lanthanum. Low-energy lightbulbs need terbium. The permanent magnets used in a 3 megawatt wind turbine use 2 tons of neodymium and other rare earths.

Then there are the workers with no protective gear standing over vats of chemicals all day, and the “makeshift” plants pumping chemicals into the ground. Just lovely. I’m so glad Demi Moore got that new Prius for her birthday.