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.
n small workshops near Baotou, workers wearing no protective clothing watch over huge vats of acid and other chemicals, steam rising from rusty pipes, as they stir and bag toxic liquids and powders, turning the rare earth elements into compounds and oxides for further processing into batteries and magnets. Wearing no masks, they breathe air heavy with fumes and dust and handle chemicals without gloves.
A thousand miles to the southeast, in Jiangxi province, the extraction process is more damaging. Green hills are studded with makeshift plants which pump acid into the earth. Last September villagers in Pitou county blocked lorries carrying chemicals and picketed the council, angry that their fields had been ruined.
“We farm rice but cannot harvest anything any more,” said a woman, who was afraid to give her name because her husband is still in prison for protesting. “Fruit trees don’t bear fruit any more. Fish die in the river. We used to wash in the river and lots of fish would come to us, but there are none left. Even the weeds died.”
Officially the polluting plants have been closed down, but villagers say they still operate at night, under armed guard, with the collusion of local Communist party leaders who help mafia bosses keep the lucrative trade going.
Over the past two decades lax environmental standards and low labour costs have made it impossible for other countries to compete. Now, as the world seeks a new economy based on renewable energy, China produces more than 95% of rare earth supplies.
Global demand is expected to reach 140,000 tons next year. But in August Beijing alarmed the markets when it threatened to restrict the export quota to 35,000 tons per annum for the next six years.
At a rare earths conference in Hong Kong last month, the buzz among overseas executives was about how to break the Chinese monopoly.
“If the purpose of putting hybrid vehicles on the road is to lower our dependence on foreign oil, and all we’re doing is buying cars that need Chinese rare earth materials, aren’t we trading one dependence for another?” asked Mark Smith, chief executive of Molycorp Minerals, a US mining firm.
“If we don’t get a couple of projects up and running there’s going to be a severe shortage of rare earth in the world and all these clean energy policies aren’t going to be possible.”
Preparing a rare earth mine to western environmental standards is costly. According to Dudley Kingsnorth, an Australian expert, China can mine the elements at a third of the cost, partly because of lax standards. “I think it will be at least 10 years before China will match our standards,” he said.
“A large part of that will be pressure from producers of televisions and cars who don’t want activists waving placards and saying this is what you’re doing to destroy the environment in China.”
At Baotou, a multi-million-dollar rare earth industrial zone is under construction. On one wall a slogan in red characters exhorts: “Make endless effort, Become the leader of the world in the rare earth industry.”
Zhao Zengqi, president of the Baotou Research Institute of Rare Earths, said: “The environmental problems include emissions with harmful elements such as fluorine and sulphur, waste water that contains excessive acid and radioactive materials.”
By restricting the export of raw rare earth, China hopes to attract high-end manufacturers and persuade them to transfer technology.
“China has 1.3 billion people. We cannot continue to supply the world with rare earth like we did before,” said Zhao.
In 1987, when rare earths started to be used for computers and other electronic gadgets, long before the boom in green technologies, China’s then leader, Deng Xiaoping, said: “The Middle East has oil, but China has rare earth.”
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