The Elements of Power by David S. Abraham

Author:David S. Abraham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2015-04-19T04:00:00+00:00

IX

Sustainable Use

The Environmental Calculus of the Rare Metal Age

Zhang Yang’e, a Chinese farmer from the remote village of Dingnan in Jiangxi Province, lives some ten meters from a rare earth element mine. The operation poisoned her well and killed her crops. “The water used to taste sweet and our neighbors all loved it. But now it has been become undrinkable,” she told a local reporter. “Even my vegetables withered after I watered them with well water,” Zhang says.1

People no longer swim in the rivers around Jiangxi Province. They have turned toxic, killing most of what once lived in them. From above the rolling green hills of Jiangxi, a province roughly the size of Greece, you can see the devastation of the mines. Some leave bare swaths of beige clay, as if the miners had peeled off the skin of the earth. Other mines slice around the contours of the hills in unnatural but elegant tiers, like smaller curved versions of the CBMM (Companhia Brasileira de Metalurgia e Mineração) mine in Araxá. Each mine follows its own unique path according to the land’s geology, but the mining process is the same—and so are the scars.

Even though you may never have been to the hills of Jiangxi your footprint is there. Nearly all of your electronics contain specks of metals from those mines because, as we saw in chapter 4, the hills in southern China produce nearly all the world’s dysprosium needed in all our high-tech goods. When we import Kindles, we export pollution, including wastewater, carbon dioxide emissions, and acid mine drainage.2

To gain access to rare earths, Zhang’s neighbors dig eight-foot-deep holes in the hillside and pour down ammonia sulfate acid into them. The hills are made up not so much of rock or dirt—but a rather brittle sandy clay that the acid easily penetrates. The rare earth elements, such as dysprosium and terbium, in Jiangxi are easy to access because of the weak chemical bonds between the rare earth minerals and the clay. So the mining process is similar to pouring water on a mound of potter’s clay and then watching the pile disintegrate.3

Once the acid has washed away most of the clay, miners trudge through a swampy mess of brown muck that compresses with each step. Their clothes splattered beige from the wet clay make them look more like painters, as they hoist white bags of brown sludge over their shoulders. They lug them to a network of tropical aqua-blue and brown treatment pools of solvent connected to one another by white PVC piping. Its deep rich blue liquid is oddly alluring, like a small child’s water park. But this jerry-rigged web of plastic on the slopes of the hills is no playground. It chemically helps separate the rare earth elements from other minerals in the rest of the clay. The material that’s left after the acid bath is baked in a kiln to form a concentrated mix of rare earths. It’s a far easier and cheaper process, even compared to CBMM’s in Brazil.

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