The Dystopian Lake Filled By the World's Tech Sludge 215
New submitter trevc sends this story from the BBC:
Hidden in an unknown corner of Inner Mongolia is a toxic, nightmarish lake created by our thirst for smartphones, consumer gadgets and green tech. The city-sized Baogang Steel and Rare Earth complex dominates the horizon, its endless cooling towers and chimneys reaching up into grey, washed-out sky. Stretching into the distance, lies an artificial lake filled with a black, barely-liquid, toxic sludge. ... 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.
mutations have to start somewhere. (Score:5, Funny)
who cares what happens on Giedi Prime as long as the spice flows.
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Not until late in the series - and it takes tleilaxu genetic technology to adapt them to another planet. Unmodified sandworms are too niche in biology to survive in any other ecosystem, but the tleilaxu are pretty good with biotech.
Objectivist utopia (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like an objectivist utopia
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Nope. They will never understand that. They also don't understand that it was the ignoring of private property (and damage to it via pollution) by government that led to the environmental destruction of the industrial revolution. If private property rights were enforced you couldn't dump your sludge or have it's runoff go onto someones property without compensating for the damage.Pollution was allowed because it was for the common good. Now where have we heard that before?
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Re:Objectivist utopia (Score:2)
It sounds like a standard mine tailings dam to me. You can see it on Google maps? So what? You can see much smaller tailings dams all over the world on Google maps. Yeah, they're disgusting, but we'd need to completely stop using metal to get rid of them.
The important thing is not that it's a tailings dam, but how it's constructed and managed - and there's no hint of that. A properly constructed and managed tailings dam shouldn't be a major environmental issue, but a poorly constructed or managed one is a d
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Coincidentally, a Facebook friend posted this video of the place: Baotou toxic lake [youtu.be].
As i suspected, it's a standard - although huge - tailings dam. Anywhere there's a metalliferous mine, you'll find one (or more) of these. I've only worked in one mine (in Australia) and their tailings dam had been incompetently built and managed - and it leaks into the surrounding soil and water table. I suspect they're like that everywhere, as mining companies only care about money, not the environment, and governments tur
Unnecessary, but profitable. (Score:5, Insightful)
You may not have heard of Baotou, but the mines and factories here help to keep our modern lives ticking.
We're able to produce most of what we use, including rare earth minerals, without creating toxic sludge lakes. The only reason we send all of these industries to China is to because their lax environmental and labor laws allow cheaper production, and thus higher profit margins.
Our modern lives don't depend on utterly fucking up our environment, but ridiculous executive pay and concentration of wealth at the top benefit greatly from it. Studies (which I'm too lazy to look up, but I'm sure others can find easily) show that it doesn't cost that much more to make goods in the US and Europe, labor and environmental regulations and all. The outsourcing of manufacturing hasn't even significantly dropped retail prices much, though profit margins (and net profits) are at record highs across most industries.
Re:Unnecessary, but profitable. (Score:5, Interesting)
The Moto X was built in the US, I recall reading somewhere that it cost around $2 more to assemble in the US. I would assume however that the parts were not manufactured in the US, but I could be wrong.
Re:Unnecessary, but profitable. (Score:5, Insightful)
"I want my two dollars"
and for that damn the species.
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I would like to know where that statistic comes from- is that just for the cost of labor? How do the costs compare when you must build a facility? Then there are disposal costs and taxes.....
Re:Unnecessary, but profitable. (Score:5, Informative)
http://thenextweb.com/google/2... [thenextweb.com]
wages are $12-$14 in US, $4 in China, rest is offset by cheaper shipping.
http://www.informationweek.com... [informationweek.com]?
Says something about $5 difference, and gives a good breakout of hardware costs.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... [theregister.co.uk]
Says $4.
So I was off, but not by much, it appears that China just isn't cheap anymore. In the US they are more likely to use machines to assemble where possible, in China, they historically considered people less expensive, but that may have changed over the years.
Re:Unnecessary, but profitable. (Score:5, Insightful)
The operative word there is "was". That plant is gone now, moved to Asia in 2014. Also, it was an "assembly" plant; the major components were made in China, as you suspected.
There were big claims made and lots of happy talk about 'merican jobs, herp derp. The cold reality is the plant is gone, the 'experiment' failed, and whatever statements about how it "wasn't cost considerations" is just so much corporate grifter B.S.
The ability of the West to feather its environmental regulatory nest without multiplying the cost of manufactured goods depends entirely on evacuating the industrial base to unregulated third world Asian hell holes. That is reality. Don't like it? Feel free to substitute whatever fiction you like best, just like everyone else does.
Re:Unnecessary, but profitable. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Unnecessary, but profitable. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Unnecessary, but profitable. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Unnecessary, but profitable. (Score:4, Informative)
Also, China can undercut anyone else on price by sacrificing their environment.
Re:Unnecessary, but profitable. (Score:5, Insightful)
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At least until healthcare and rioting in the streets eats you alive.
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Do modern solar panels need environmentally destructive production techniques?
Perhaps not:
http://www.rsc.org/chemistrywo... [rsc.org]
Whilst I'm not excusing China's pathetic environmental record, aren't these same neodymium magnets also in the motors that create electricity for hydro, coal, gas and nuclear? If so then wind turbines would still be better.
Re:Unnecessary, but profitable. (Score:5, Interesting)
Posting AC, as I'm too lazy to log in.
A few years ago, I was looking to build a project. I found out there were two tiers:
Built it up to high standards: The US, Russia, Germany, Japan, Sweden, the UK, China, Canada, and many other countries could build what I needed to a top spec.
Build it cheap: China could undercut everyone, and could offer bargain basement specs turned into bargain basement products with canned ass for quality.
What I ended up doing, after looking for manufacturing the world over is finding a place that could do what I wanted... all within 50 miles (~80 km) of where I lived. Since prices were almost identical across the board, I just went with local factories to crank the thing out for sale.
tl;dr, if you want it cheap, China is your go to guy. If you want it done right, the entire world can do it.
The only exception to this was a type of mechanical security piece which had to be milled in Switzerland due to the insanely high tolerances required. I later replaced the proprietary key assembly with an Abloy PROTEC2 cam lock and key switch [1].
[1]: Security is something to be taken seriously. Yes, someone can wrench their way in by force, but it leaves an obvious signature... if a lock gets picked, there is little to no proof of intrusion, so I use top tier locks to do the job right. In the late 1980s, and early 1990s, many data center appliances used Medeco or other high security brands. Now, if I see a lock on something, it likely is a CH751 lock or something just as shitty.
Manufacturing profitibility is complicated (Score:5, Informative)
We're able to produce most of what we use, including rare earth minerals, without creating toxic sludge lakes. The only reason we send all of these industries to China is to because their lax environmental and labor laws allow cheaper production, and thus higher profit margins.
Not correct, or at least not completely true. The primary reason China has captured a lot of manufacturing business is because they have a large supply of cheap labor. And most of the reason it is cheap is precisely because the supply is so large - economics 101 stuff. Lots of laborers competing for jobs keeps wages suppressed. You are correct however that lax environmental policies do play a role in some industries as well. Stuff like glass, steel, etc can be pretty rough on the environment and not having to pay for these externalities can be a competitive advantage. China doesn't have a bad pollution problem just by coincidence. That is the result of decades of sacrificing the environment to boost wages and build industry. (It also has a lot to do with the number of dirty coal fired power plants they use)
Studies (which I'm too lazy to look up, but I'm sure others can find easily) show that it doesn't cost that much more to make goods in the US and Europe, labor and environmental regulations and all.
Depends strongly on what exactly you are producing. I run a manufacturing company. Whether something costs more to make in China versus the US depends primarily on the labor content of what is being produced. Labor intensive goods tend to get produced in low labor cost countries. Capital intensive goods tend to get produced in capital efficient (usually high labor cost) countries. It's obviously not quite that simple but it's a good first approximation. Stuff that can be automated or which has a lot of IP content tends to stay domestic. Stuff that requires the lowest possible labor costs tends to migrate elsewhere.
The outsourcing of manufacturing hasn't even significantly dropped retail prices much, though profit margins (and net profits) are at record highs across most industries.
Hasn't dropped retail prices much? A quick trip through Walmart should disabuse you of that notion. I've quoted jobs for stuff that is sold through Walmart. The target prices sometimes were below our cost of materials. Much of that cost savings is being passed on precisely because that is Walmart's business model - to be a price leader you have to pass on savings to customers or someone else will. If you think manufacturers are keeping all those profits from offshoring then you are very, very mistaken.
Profit margins are sometimes higher on domestically manufactured goods because of selection bias. The companies that are left are generally those which are not in labor intensive industries where offshoring makes sense due to intense price competition. The ones that are left are those that can for one reason or another protect their margins. Sometimes through IP, sometimes through capital efficiency, sometimes through automation, sometimes due to customer requirements, sometimes due to regulations. The US manufacturing sector is roughly the same size as China's when measured in dollars so plenty of stuff gets made here. Just not your McDonalds happy meal toys.
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Adjusting for inflation only makes today's products cheaper.
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Retail prices drop, but retail value falls as well. Which is better, a $500 mower that'll last ten years or ten $100 mowers that'll last a year each? The latter is often what you get at Walmart.
Of course that doesn't matter much for Happy Meal toys, but lead content might. Interestingly, those cheap plastic toys aren't all that labor intensive...
The companies that offshore are sharing SOME of the savings, but they seem to be keeping a fair bit for themselves as well.
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That's pretty irrelevant. Wal-Mart's success is fundamentally based on the premise that low immediate prices swamp all considerations of durability and reliability. You buy stuff at Wal-Mart because you don't really believe it's cheap fragile junk, and the low price gives you incentive to keep on foolin' yourself.
The retail prices are lower, at the point-of-sale. The average Joe Sixpack consumer is not doing a TCO calculation, so the sales model works for them.
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You may not have heard of Baotou, but the mines and factories here help to keep our modern lives ticking.
The only reason we send all of these industries to China is to because their lax environmental and labor laws allow cheaper production, and thus higher profit margins.
In the global economy China competes by having "lax environmental and labor laws" to attract "these industries." The fault, if we are to assign fault and blame, lies with a political system in China that is not yet robust enough to protect the environment. The same conditions would exist and did exist in the United States until the political economy forced change. Look into the Copper Hills of Tennessee then and now. For a few years in the late '60s and early '70s I lived on Missionary Ridge in Chattano
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Western countries have been busy writing treaties that prohibit import tariffs for goods that had environmentally damaging production/farming/fishing methods.
Don't like tuna fishing killing dolphins? tough, you can't import tax bad tuna.
The west deliberately allow China's poor pollution controls. Why?
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Studies (which I'm too lazy to look up, but I'm sure others can find easily) show that it doesn't cost that much more to make goods in the US and Europe, labor and environmental regulations and all
Actually a Slashdot article from last year says that's not true, it was more expensive in the US.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]
Now there's always more to the story. I'm sure the Google closed factory has lots of other reasons, and this being Slashdot I'm sure many people will point out to me how I'm completely wrong. And maybe I am. But my point is, someone tried it and came to the conclusion that it costs that much more to make goods in the US that its not worth it.
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Studies (which I'm too lazy to look up, but I'm sure others can find easily) show that it doesn't cost that much more to make goods in the US and Europe, labor and environmental regulations and all.
That's kind of a joke. When Apple had its manufacturing in the US, everyone complained that Macintoshes were more expensive.
It's fun to blame rich executives and corporations, but the reality is people at every income level are happy to get things for a dollar less.
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It's not so much the cost of making the product; as others have shown below, that's really a push. A few dollars one way or another on a $300 COGM product. The BIG difference is taxation. Sell that phone for $700 - that's $400 of profit. China's tax rate is about 60% of the US [kpmg.com] - meaning on that $400 profit, in the US you'll pay around $160 in taxes. In China, you'll pay around $100. That's a $60 difference - that's the big money.
Companies don't just look overseas because of lower labor costs (or lower
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millionaires who are white men, rather.
NOTHING TO SEE HERE CONSUMER (Score:3, Insightful)
Move along! Move along! Could I interest you in yet another incremental improvement in technology?
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This problem isn't for the consumer to fix. The fix should come from the people who suffer from the pollution. Otherwise, you're just pushing on a rope.
Author Doesn't Understand mining (Score:5, Insightful)
The author makes a good point: we shouldn't be treating gadgets as disposable.
Where the article fails is the implication (intentional or not) that "green" tech is creating some new problem that didn't exist before. Every hard rock mining operation no matter the purpose (INCLUDING some mining operations that extract oil from tar sands) produces toxic chemical laced by-products that must be dealt with (frequently by putting them in tailings ponds).
Re:Author Doesn't Understand mining (Score:5, Insightful)
We've treated them as disposable in recent years because technology was advancing too rapidly to bother about building them to last. There's no point making a phone that can be repaired and maintaned for twenty years when next year's model will have twice the memory and three times the processing power, and a radio that moves bits twice as fast too. There may come a time when that will change.
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$300 and $400 dollar items "disposable"? Really? I get anxious when I have to spend more than a few hundred, and expect it to last.
It is easy enough to design something with upgradeability in mind, not to mention having 3 times the processing power or memory really doesn't increase the usability of a phone. You're not doing ray tracing on it.
I'd lean more on planned obsolescence and basic consumerism. I can't see where gadgets have really improved quality of life that much, but it is certainly easier to sel
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$300 and $400 dollar items "disposable"? Really? I get anxious when I have to spend more than a few hundred, and expect it to last.
What good is a status symbol that everybody can afford ?
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It's not a question of afford as much as a question of value. I mean I can even see the case made for uber expensive watches, but those will actually stick around for a few lifetimes, and will probably increase in value.
If electric cars were sold with non-replaceable batteries, and had to be junked as the only way to improve performance, people would laugh at the folly. Yet for consumer electronics, we accept this as the norm, and even ritualized the process There is a huge disconnect here.
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There's no point making a phone that can be repaired and maintaned for twenty years when next year's model will have twice the memory and three times the processing power, and a radio that moves bits twice as fast too.
We could have said the same about desktop PCs back in the day, but we didn't.
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I don't get your point. How many computers have been repaired and maintained for twenty years? There's some out there (I think I could still fire up the old TRS-80 4P), but most are fairly recent. Moreover, the big explosions in hardware price and capability are over ten years old now. A 2005 computer would be a lot closer to a 2015 computer in power than to a 1995 one.
Re:Author Doesn't Understand mining (Score:5, Informative)
Valuing device longevity rather than having all devices being disposable after 2-3 years seems like low hanging fruit from an environmental perspective that gets very little attention. Especially now that things like Blueray players and other devices are getting embedded apps like Netflix and a variety of other applications, it is getting harder to have devices with reasonable lifespans. The manufacturers in general are driven to produce products with the lowest possible price right now, and have little incentive to build in longevity. Devices containing internet connected software applications make this worse because manufacturers don't want to develop and support updates for something sold five years ago. My experience too often is that manufactures force firmware updates and eventually one of the updates breaks the functionality of the device. There is no incentive to maintain a stable code base that can exist indefinitely without intervention. How many appliances purchased in decades past lasted for twenty years or better? How many of the things we buy today will be in use 7 years from now? I think we are in a period of rapid innovation where stable higher longevity products are not going to be the norm, but I really hope in a few years we can adapt to a more sustainable model where the things we buy can have a longer expected service life. Rapid innovation and extreme devaluing of commodity items comes at cost, despite the benefits to the consumer.
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Valuing device longevity seem like abject stupidity when you're talking about a device that is obsolete within a few years of introduction.
Yeah, we could build computers and such that lasted twenty years. So, anyone still using a computer made in the mid-90s? Yeah, 200 MHz & 200 MB RAM machines were pretty awesome back
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The author makes a good point: we shouldn't be treating gadgets as disposable.
Easy for me to stop (everything that's EOL in my house is re-purposed or broken down to usable components; including smart devices). Easy for me to convince *some* of my friends to stop. Other friends have the IDGAF attitude about it. Try to convince people I don't even know and in most cases it's deaf ears (those ears that aren't deaf were usually already on the way to being their own "pebble" anyway without my nudge). Everyone goes on about "pebble in a pond" methods of effecting world change. What t
The Good, The Bad, and The Stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
We outsourced our jobs and our pollution.
Re:The Good, The Bad, and The Stupid (Score:4, Informative)
I think that is called 'externalising the costs.'
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We outsourced our jobs and our pollution.
Until the pollution floats back over the Pacific. Wheels keep on spinning round....
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While there may be gaps in our social services; I'd rather be 'poor' in the US than most other countries.
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hey, at least the cardboard is pre-assembled by Samsung. Rather than the Ikea version (you get some sheets of paper, glue, and some boxing tape.)
Check the data! (Score:2, Insightful)
According to Google Maps, Baotou, Inner Mongolia, has one fairly small sludge pond from which carefully posed hysterical pictures are taken for the referenced article, while the remainder of the city appears quite nice. So once again we find that we have here just another over-hyped fictional story from the evil media.
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See Kingston Coal Ash Pond [google.com] for example.
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I had much the same thought about the size of the toxic lake. That said the city doesn't really look like it'd support the quoted 2.7 million workers either. I wonder if google is displaying older images or something.
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Third World Problems (Score:3)
If we (and by 'we' I mean places like California) were really concerned with the global environment, we'd open our own rare earth mines and processing facilities. So the EPA could keep a closer eye on them and they could be run under tighter regulations. Or at a minimum, pass one of those state laws prohibiting technologies based on polluting industries. So let's see them give up iPads, Teslas, wind and solar power and all those other 'filthy' products.
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California is more concerned with the environment than anyone else,
Prove it. Give up your dirty tech or provide a clean alternative.
Is there anything in this lake of sludge... (Score:2)
...That was not in the ore taken out of the ground in the first place?
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If it was just left-over ore that happens to be not-rare-earth-minerals, that would be one thing.
However, this is all the nasty chemical shit they use to separate the not-rare-earth-minerals from the rare earth minerals without neutralizing the nasty caustic shit. Much like what is in Hanford, WA isn't just radioactive not-plutonium, but all of the caustic acids and shit used to separate plutonium from not-plutonium.
A new rare earth? (Score:2)
I've never heard of Dystopium before and there is a lake full of it?
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Nice stuff, dystopium. Too bad it's only useful in pure crystal form.
Filled by Baotou (Score:2)
Umm (Score:4)
artificial lake
As in, this is exactly what the lake exists for. A reservoir of sorts for slurry and other runoff from industrial processes is common the WORLD OVER.
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This guy would probably be shocked to learn that the electricity that he used to type up his article on Chinese sludge lakes created a bit of an American sludge lake that is right next to a coal power plant.
THE OUTRAGE!!
How about the Thorium (Score:2)
Since the rare earth processing plants are there, and since they dump into the lake, the question is, is that where they put the thorium?
Rare earths (not rare at all) always come complete with thorium. The problem with producing rare earths in the USA isn't the rareness, it's the waste disposal of the thorium residues. Nobody in the US will buy or store thorium. Thus it must be branded as a waste product, and disposing of a radioactive waste product is insanely expensive if it is possible at all.
So is th
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At the end of the article they mention that the radiation level of the lake is 3x background radiation.. which in the grand scheme of things isn't that much.
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Average world annual background radiation dose is 3 mSv [wikipedia.org] while the same source has the average in the US at 6 mSv, largely from medical scans. So 3x the background radiation is equal to living in the US and getting a head CT scan.
The horrors.
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The problem with producing rare earths in the USA isn't the rareness, it's the waste disposal of the thorium residues
Mix it with the rock waste, and dump it back where it came from.
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throwing away thorium makes about as much sense as throwing out crude oil once you've skimmed the kerosene and paraffin off the top. =(
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You can always dig it back up when there's finally a working thorium reactor.
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Now only if there were service offerings where you could have someone replace the battery on your iPad [batteriesplus.com]. Some of which can do it while you wait for 5 - 10 minutes.
If only.
But that still won't stop people from bitching I suppose.
Slightly misleading article (Score:2)
I remember this lake... (Score:2)
It killed Tasha Yar.
Also is it just me, or are there a suspicious number of ACs chiming in about how there is only a really tiny sludge lake and Baotou is in fact wonderful? Because I looked on Google maps, there was pretty big sludge lake and the place looks pretty dismal.
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It killed Tasha Yar.
Also is it just me, or are there a suspicious number of ACs chiming in about how there is only a really tiny sludge lake and Baotou is in fact wonderful? Because I looked on Google maps, there was pretty big sludge lake and the place looks pretty dismal.
Did you zoom in?
I agree that from a high level view it looks pretty barren, but if you zoom out quite a ways you will see that it seems to be an area of China that is quite arid, so you won't see a lot of greenery. They have modern buildings, streets, athletic fields, etc. Zoom in and you can see this.
If you want a comparison, take a look at Phoenix Arizona on the map. It looks pretty barren and ugly too on satellite. One difference is that most home owners in Phoenix landscape around their houses so wh
Future Resources (Score:3)
In the future they will mine this like for the vast resources it contains. Just like landfills. Trash to treasures.
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Windmills may or may not be better for the environment than nuke power, but the places you can put a nuke power station are more limited compared to where you can put a windmill.
Re:Great article. (Score:4, Insightful)
Same goes for windmills, etc. Are they really better for the environment than, say, nuclear power?
Uranium has to be mined (most likely using similar circumstances) as well. Most everything that we use and dispose of has an environmental impact.
The real point of this is the fact that China doesn't have better environmental protection laws. The US had issues like this up until the states and the EPA began to regulate environmental impacts. The Cuyahoga River fire was a good example of why we began to clean up our act in the US.
But the reason that I quoted that line is because windmills, solar, nuclear and geothermal are good sources of electricity that our going to lower CO2 emissions and hopefully slow the human environmental impact on the world. All of these can cause a negative environmental impact, if done in an unregulated environment, but they can all hopefully improve the environment as well.
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I buy a new phone about every 3 years, when my previous one is worn out. Most people do this every year or two. What a waste...This article shows what you're missing when you sign that lease, or buy that new iPhone.
I replace mine with about the same frequency. Not to toot Apple's horn but they have trade in programs which reduce the cost of the new phone and they refurbish or recycle [apple.com] the old one. Many people will hand their phones down, too. Often the only thing that the handsets really need is a battery.
The motors and battery (which needs to be replaced every X years) for your new Prius are not so great for the environment. Sure, it makes you feel good to not fill up at the gas pump, but what is the true environmental cost of that car?
One argument that can be made is efficiency, is it more efficient to tap the grid vs generating energy at home? Is less fuel consumption beneficial? Here's a Forbes article [forbes.com] about Prius, having a battery replaced with
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It is also a lot easier and cheaper to recycle the batteries for an electric car than mine for all new materials. Those worn out battery packs are far from a complete loss. And while an electric motor may wear out it's likely that the rare earth parts can be re-used as the just don't wear out.
Re:Great article. (Score:5, Interesting)
The motors and battery (which needs to be replaced every X years) for your new Prius are not so great for the environment.
The motors last forever if they are properly constructed. The battery is a prime target for recycling, because it's a lot cheaper to "mine" the battery for metals than digging them out of the ground. Whether the original mining is bad for the environment depends on whether people care about it or not. Making such a toxic lake is not a requirement, it's just cheaper. But if people no longer accept it, it's possible to make a clean factory.
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That's all well and good, but we don't [yet] live in the world where everyone is *choosing* to make that clean factory, although the vast majority of Americans seem to think that all of these technologies come from it.
At least you accept and understand the situation. My point is that the vast majority of people don't, and that's why I'm glad to see an article like this.
Nice strawman (Score:3)
And I've found such people exist primarily in the imaginations of the people who complain about them.(I'll concede there may be some exceptions, see Einstein and the limits of human stupidity) Look, anyone with grey cells knows that windmills don't magically spring up from the ground, they have to be manufactured, and manufacturing creates pollution, especially in countries that find i
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I've found such people exist primarily in the imaginations of the people who complain about them.
Not so. While I'm a nuclear power proponent, I have nothing against wind and solar power. I even like them in concept. However, I've never seen a single reference to a study of the effects of windmills on regional wind patterns, massive areas of solar panels on regional temperature/wind/etc., let alone manufacturing of these things. Are they issues? Perhaps not. Maybe even "probably not". But the "green" community doesn't even entertain the possibility that they could be problems. It's just as bad as the ha
Re:Unintended consequences (Score:4, Insightful)
Republicans:
1) abolish EPA
2) Profit!!
3) Giant lakes of goo
Let us know when you start planning ahead
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Re:Thank you for being NIMBY (Score:5, Informative)
Feeling fortunate that Mongolia is not in my backyard. From all of us Techies... Thank You Mongolia!
This story is about China, not Mongolia. "Outer Mongolia" is the country of Mongolia. "Inner Mongolia" is a region of China, which has about eight times as many ethnic Mongolians as Mongolia does.
Made in the USA (Score:5, Interesting)
Every form of energy has an environmental cost, the cost of making windmills and solar panels are mostly hidden in China, so Al Gore and his buddies can pretend that the cost doesn't exist.
That would be a great argument except the majority of wind turbines used in the US are also made in the the US [grist.org] these days and the plenty are exported as well [thinkprogress.org].
I bet there are other toxic lakes just outside the processing plants that make solar panels too, since China currently doesn't care much about pollution.
I've been to China. They care about the pollution plenty. They also care about trying raise hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. You think doing that while protecting the environment is an easy thing to do? It's easy to sit in the cheap seats and decry what they are doing but claiming they don't care is simply not fair or true.
Re:"The World" (Score:5, Funny)
In China's defense, they did post clearly marked "No Swimming" signs.
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If you look south of the sludge pond you can see what looks like an older sludge pond that is being processed. Yes, it's nasty and dangerous and definitely should be contained, but isn't that what sludge ponds are for? To keep all that nasty stuff contained for later processing.
Re:Their choice. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Holy shit. Russia wins by a mile.