A lake is located to the west of the city, one filled with a black-gray mud of toxic and radioactive material.
This is a garbage dump, a graphic name for what is actually a landfill. Baotou is the world capital for rare earth elements – metals that are vital to modern technology and especially renewable energy sources.
This lake is the dirty secret of clean energy. It is the by-product of the cultivation of rare earths. It is open to the air, but worse penetrates the ground below, poisoning the water.
The Chinese authorities are aware of the problem. That’s why they follow us: at least eight cars always in our queue for three days. They question who we are talking to and ultimately prevent us from speaking to them completely, citing COVID-19 regulations.
Picture: Many cars were always in our queue for three days
But locals still want to talk, mainly because they are unhappy that government promises to clean up the mess have not been kept.
In the villages surrounding the lake, a woman sitting on a sofa by the side of the road tells us “water is bad – bad”.
“We asked them to give us something to filter, but they did not do it,” she said before her employees cut her off.
On the same road, a farmer who has just finished watering his field says, “Our water is not very good. It does not meet the drinking water standards for humans or animals.”
He says that in another village not far away, people got sick.
“It’s called Dalai Lama. The village was infected – 30 to 40 percent of the villagers got cancer,” he said.
“Once they found the pollution, the government moved all the villagers elsewhere. They forbade the local villagers to cultivate the land.”
Image: Baotou is the world capital for rare earth items
“In fact, we are also seriously infected,” he said, adding that they now have to rely on wells more than 200 meters deep to avoid the worst pollution.
The village was moved about five miles away – a relatively newly built residential complex. The fields that were cultivated for generations were exchanged with high rises.
An old man in a small park inside describes old Dalai Lama.
“It’s unfit for life anymore,” he says. “It is contaminated with the Baotou Steel garbage dump. People are sick. So many.”
But he would rather go home.
“Generally, I think life here is not as good as it used to be in the village,” he says. “We are not used to today’s lives in buildings, we preferred to live in the village.
“The water is not good yet.”
Picture: The lake is filled with a black-gray mud of toxic and radioactive material
For years, Baotou was a thriving city. Deng Xiaoping, China’s leader after President Mao, said: “The Middle East has oil, China has rare earths.” And Baotou was at the center of it.
“The political priority until the end of the first decade of the 21st century was really production first, development first and refinement later,” said Julie Klinger, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Delaware and author of Rare Earth. Borders.
“There are much wider impacts in the region resulting from several decades of large-scale industrial mining and processing. fishery resources and what you have.
“So much so that public health researchers in China have identified a number of specific cancers associated with exposure to contaminants from the rare earth and iron mining industries.”
Professor Klinger says that in addition to cancers in humans, animals also became ill with skeletal fluorosis. “Teeth continue to grow and become very fragile, with the result that they can no longer eat and eventually die of starvation.”
Image: Locals unhappy that government promises to clean up chaos have not been kept
This is not solely China’s fault. Western countries happily outsource dirty, hazardous work or the mining and processing of rare earths in China, where environmental regulations were more relaxed, rather than digging in their backyards.
Since 2009, China has changed course, focusing more on cleaning up pollution and focusing on “high quality” development.
The testimony of the villagers shows that the problem has not been solved, despite these efforts. Neither the local government nor Baogang, the state-owned wastewater management company, has responded to multiple requests for comment.
At the moment, Baotou presents two questions, one pressing and the other longer term.
Water still flows from the garbage pond to the nearby Yellow River – China’s “mother river”, which holds 160 million people. Agriculture there depends on the fact that water does not face the same pollution that doomed the village of Dalahai.
Picture: Water still rinsing from the garbage pond to the nearby Yellow River
Second, rare earths are vital to the transition to green energy. The need to make this transition should not have the cost of dumping waste in the environment and in people’s lives.
Countries need to “make sure that the urgent need to acquire these raw materials to build our path to fossil fuel dependence is not used as a mechanism to undermine democratic decision-making and collaborative planning,” says Professor Klinger.
“It’s not that we do not have the technology or know-how to extract and process rare earths in a more socially and environmentally responsible way.
“It’s that we have created market conditions that discourage virtually any activity of this kind, because price, the lowest possible price, remains the determining factor in whether an industry is sinking or swimming.”
Otherwise, this new industrial revolution is in danger of repeating the mistakes of the old.
