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. In 2009 China produced 95% of the world’s supply of these elements, and it’s estimated that the Bayan Obo mines just north of Baotou contain 70% of the world’s reserves. But, as we would discover, at what cost?
Disturbing.
Maybe people should stop buying every tech gadget that comes out?
I do my part. I use my stuff until it fails and then replace as selectively as possible.
(eg. My GeForce GT430 died about two weeks ago and it was bought to replace a failed GeForce 7600GS that I’d had since 2007)
I also limit myself to only two devices (plus any used PCs I can divert from eWaste for playing old games in a more authentic arrangement) to save money, my desktop PC and my OpenPandora Linux palmtop.
Edited 2015-04-04 00:19 UTC
I try to buy things that last a long time or can be upgraded without tossing the whole thing away and if possible I try to keep even old stuff functional and find some use for it or someone else who could use it instead. It’s just that things that last longer and are upgradeable tend to also be more expensive.
One concern with keeping old gadgets and stuff around, however, is energy-efficiency; many older gadgets are much more power-hungry or they take longer to achieve the same result which results in more energy spent for the same task. At least I also tend to pay attention to my energy-use, powering things off when they’re not in active use and unplugging chargers when not needed and stuff like that.
Edited 2015-04-04 00:35 UTC
WereCatf,
If you live someplace cold and benefit from the heat byproduct anyways, then you can remain guilt-free about half the year
Of course at some point it must make ecological sense to throw it away old energy guzzlers, but it’s still probably much longer than the product cycle manufacturers would like us to keep up with.
Edited 2015-04-04 00:55 UTC
Interesting related point.
I read an article maybe a year ago about how colocation facilities are actively seeking out places that have both good connectivity and cold winters (like Barrie, Ontario, Canada, about half an hour from where I live) because they save a lot on cooling in the winter.
Yep, it makes a lot of sense. The cold climate turns a lot of conventional wisdom around on it’s head.
Somebody’s been downvoting a lot of my posts lately, why all the hate? It’s not wrong, for the purposes of heating in the winter, appliance inefficiencies can actually be productive and help offset the heating requirements.
This has bizarre implications. Consider a conventional refrigerator in a heated home. Even if a fridge were theoretically only 10% efficient in the summer, in the winter that 90% waste simply warms your house, so it is actually productive. In fact you could contemplate disconnecting your fridge and bringing in ice from outside every day to cool the fridge, but it would not actually save energy because the cold ice from outside would absorb heat and increase the energy needed to warm the house in the winter.
kwan_e,
For a consumer, it’s becoming harder to replace & upgrade parts. The lack of hardware upgrade potential, lack of software/security updates, changing adapters, irreplaceable batteries are all factors that contribute to electronic waste.
That’s certainly a major factor, but kwan_e’s observation alludes to something the consumer has a bit more control over, namely the desire to own all the shiny things, regardless of whether they need them or not.
The lack of upgrades and reparable components is a bigger problem but also a harder one to solve because it involves education of consumers (many of whom simply won’t care) and a shift in corporate philosophy (ditto).
That one’s a real bummer. Most corporations are simply blindly going after the biggest profits they can get and any “green” things they have going are merely attempts at gaining positive PR. There’s pretty much nothing that can be done about it either, unless we move to a totalitarian society where all wealth is shared equally and government owns everything. And then the greed of those running the government undermines everything.
Edited 2015-04-04 13:11 UTC
Athlander,
That’s curious, I actually consider providing upgrades to older devices to be the easier of those two problems to solve (if we ignore the economic incentives not to). Adding ram, a larger flash or a new battery should be easy for most users, the rest could probably have it done at the store. Even educating users wouldn’t be that difficult if the manufacturer actually promoted it.
The underlying problem is that the incentives for most manufacturers is inherently ecologically unsound. From home electronics to home appliances, the build quality has plummeted. It’s a difficult trend to buck because the benefits for manufacturers are twofold: they save money by making cheaper products that don’t have to last as long, and they make more money by selling these products more often.
It’s just a temporary problem until the next tech paradigm shift.
Carbon nano-tubes ?
We in the West have simply shifted all the seedy results of an industrial economy to elsewhere. And we congratulate ourselves being so “green”.
+1
=(
The real problem is not Rare Earths – it is Chinese industrial practices. Refining Rare Earths shouldn’t be a particularly polluting or dangerous process. The ‘waste’ products of a proper refining process are mostly common fertilisers such as calcium sulphate.
Are you prepared for increases in the price of tech goods. That is the only way to refine these products in a more sustainable manner.
“proper” rarely is the cheapest option.
The extra cost to consumers would be negligible (<1%). The problem is that China has 95% of the Rare Earth market and no incentive to operate properly.
The combination of planned obsolescence and disposable, toxic goods is just plain toxic. The people profiting from that can through their NIMBY weight around. They’ll never have to see any part of this they don’t like.
This is one of the reasons I’m running primarily Linux. I’m going to keep my hardware running until the last resort, and I don’t want Apple or Microsoft forcing my hand.
But, beyond that, we need to require manufacturers to cover the costs of cleanup and disposal of whatever they produce, at a bare minimum. Anything else just means that someone without the clout to defend themselves is going to treated like they’re as disposable as the garbage we’re burying them in.
While I wouldn’t want to minimise the environmental impact of the mining operations, some of the reporting in the article was just awful. Three times the background radiation level is still a tiny amount, and does not mean the waste is radioactive to any significant degree! It’s likely that’s just from concentration of the radioactive elements in the rock as a byproduct of the refining process, which is not unexpected, and isn’t exactly part of the environmental damage worth worrying about when you put it in context with the real damage. Doesn’t sound like the reporters had much understanding of basic science.