Baotou is the world’s biggest supplier of rare earth minerals and it’s hell on Earth

LYING hidden in a little-known corner of China is a town that will horrify you, yet it’s responsible for many of the luxuries we take for granted today.

Black sludge is pumped into a toxic lake — byproducts of the ingredients that make up most of our technology. Picture: Liam Young/Unknown Fields.

LYING hidden in an little-known corner of China is a town that will horrify you.

Baotou is the world’s biggest supplier of rare earth minerals — the fundamental ingredients used to make today’s technologies — and it’s hell on Earth. This pastureland turned wasteland on the edge of the Gobi desert is a toxic nightmare, evidence of the horrific effect the pursuit of consumerism has had on Earth. A recent exploration of the area was undertaken by designers Liam Young and Kate Davies from Unknown Fields, a nomadic design studio from London that travels around the world to explore the sacrifices made on our landscape to produce contemporary cities and technologies. “Huge areas of the world are sacrificed in the service of our shining gleaming futures,” says Young. “The landscapes we visit are so often ignored or forgotten yet they play a fundamental role in shaping our world. We think it is important travel to these places, to tell stories about them and think about the opportunities and consequences they suggest for how we design today.” In 1950 Baotou had a population of just 97,000. However the mining for rare earth minerals led to a population explosion and today there are 2.5 million people living and breathing the lucrative industry. China produces over 95 per cent of the world’s rare earth minerals and two thirds of this comes from Baotou. “For example a smart phone has 8 different rare earths in it. Everything from the material used in its memory to the red coloured pixels of its screen and the polish used on its glass. They are also fundamental ingredients in what we talk of as green energy industries, for example, wind turbines are one of the largest consumers of neodymium magnets,” says Young. The rare earth industry has transformed Baoutou and the devastating environmental impacts are clear. “The entire towns economy has been engineered around mining. Coal dust layers the main roads that pass through the town connecting the main blast furnaces of the refinery to the coal mines scattered around the city’s outskirts. “The city is designed as an expression of the wealth and economy that flows through it. Las Vegas lighting and vast fountains are suggestive of a thriving business capital but behind them, in the distance you can see the billowing chimney stacks of the worlds largest rare earth refinery. The shadow of this industry is visible everywhere,” says Young. And no better is this exemplified than by the town’s toxic “lake”, a black pool of waste material pumped out from surrounding factories flooding what was once fertile farm land. “The lake is seen as an enormous black smudge on Google Earth but it is not until we stood at its very edge that we could truly understand its scale,” says Young. “The refinery on the other side of the lake is the largest rare earth plant on the planet and all the waste material from this process is dumped here. It is an ocean of black mud continually pumped out from a long line of plastic pipes,” he says, This toxic waste was found to have radiation levels three times the background radiation level and was made up of a cocktail of acids, heavy metals, carcinogens and radioactive material used to process the 17 most sought after minerals in the world, says Davies. The lack of knowledge about Baotou and other cities set up to serve these industries is a clever marketing plan by media outlets says Young. So is it a cover up by the industry or is it ignorance? ”The dominant media narrative about technology is based on lightness and thinness,” he says. “Terms like the cloud, or macbook air implies that our gadgets are just ephemeral objects and this is the story we all want to believe. “In reality our technologies can be considered geological artefacts that are carved out of the earth and produced by a planetary scaled factory. Supply chains are so huge in scale that they almost become invisible. “This is a much more complicated story to tell about consumer objects and is a very difficult one for us to come to terms with. We are all a part of the production of places like the toxic lake and we all try our best to ignore it. We love our technologies to much to meaningfully engage with the conflicts they set in motion,” he explains. Davies says that global supply chains touch everything around us. “They are dug from grounds far away, assembled in factories by people from across the globe, and brought to us by vast planetary infrastructures of a scale we rarely consider. The things we consider to be everyday, have extraordinary affects on places we’ve never heard of,” says Davis. And Baoutou stands as a stark reminder of the sacrifices we make on Earth to fuel our ever increasing desire for technology. A desire that impacts not just the environment but the health of its workers too.

Originally published as Baotou is the world’s biggest supplier of rare earth minerals and it’s hell on Earth