China's Rare Earth

Richard John Seymour/Unknown Fields

There is a lake in Inner Mongolia ~ if by "lake" one means a section of land covered by viscous, toxic semi-liquid pumped in from refineries via dozens of large pipes. Recently, writer Tim Maughan joined architects and designers of the Unknown Fields Division as they followed the journey of our consumer products, and particularly our electronics, from factory to store. The lake is a 20-minute car ride away from the city of Baotou, one of the world's biggest suppliers of the misleadingly named rare-earth minerals cerium and neodymium. These minerals are not rare, Maughan explains: "Arguably, what makes [them] scarce enough to be profitable are the hugely hazardous and toxic process[es] needed to extract them from ore and to refine them into usable products." And it is the willingness to live with these processes and their consequences that has turned Baotou and its lake into what they are, "the kind of industrial landscape that America and Europe has largely forgotten" (story, video): http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150402-the-worst-place-on-earth