Chapter 8
Errors of Emission
In September 2011 an angry mob of 500 villagers broke through the chain-link fence of the Jinko Solar Holding Company solar cell factory and ransacked the premises. A torrential rainfall had flooded mismanaged vats of toxic waste that had flowed into a stream in Haining, Zhejiang Province. Residents in the area reported the day after the deluge that they had seen thousands of dead fish floating in the surrounding waters. Government inaction had ignited community fury.
Though the local Environmental Protection Bureau (EPB) had punished the facility five months before the incident for improperly storing and managing the waste, the factory had continued to operate business-as-usual. The operation was supposed to have shut down and paid a fine of 470,000 yuan (US$73,600) until its waste management system was robust. By the time the autumn rains had swept through, the facility had still ignored all injunctions the EPB had set against it. The result was a rampage by angry local citizens that cost the company thousands of dollars in damage. The incident demoted the “green credentials” of the Jinko Solar Holding Company, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
The irony of green- and clean-technology manufacturing in China is just how terribly polluting the processes are without the proper technology, safety controls, and management procedures in place. China’s rush for market share and its quest to fill its voracious appetite for energy, however, have seen many of the safety and environmental stops pulled out of operations to meet production goals that are unhinged from economic fundamentals. Privateers and local governments perceive health and safety measures as terrible inconveniences to being profitable in the cleantech sector. Cleantech in China, though, isn’t very clean during the manufacture of many of its products. The manufacturing side of the solar power industry, wind power technologies, and the batteries for electric vehicles present new hazards to human health and habitats. The residents of Haining were not the first victims of unfettered waste from the manufacture of photovoltaic (PV) products in China. Nor, likely, will they be the last.
The Dark Side of the Sun
Whereas in 2000 there was only one PV ingot manufacturer in the world, by 2009 there were more than 20. The Alibaba supply chain sourcing online search engine identified 29 polysilicon ingot producers in China in 2011. Richard Winegarner, president of Sage Concepts, a consulting firm in California, cited it usually takes at least two years to get a polysilicon producer operational. Many of the Chinese companies, he said, were attempting the same feat in half the time.1 The approach implied a huge number of corners were being cut from a dangerous process that has sharp edges of controls and technologies in place for a reason: to reduce the toxic imprint on the environment and on the lives of human beings. After all, the raison d’etre of producing solar panels is to provide energy sources that complement and may even one day supplant fossil fuels as primary power sources. Energy from the sun, transformed into use for us humans, is meant to be plentiful and clean, reducing the carbon footprint to near zero. Opportunities to provide willing international buyers solar power components in the mid-2000s were too difficult to ignore. Investors and manufacturers in China with little experience or sophistication in the industry rioted the market.
Willing buyers, prompted by feed-in tariffs in Spain and Germany, drove the price of polysilicon from US$20 per kilogram to US$300 per kilogram from 2003 through 2008.2 The new factories that were to come online in 2009 had an estimated capacity of 80,000 to 100,000 tons of polysilicon—more than doubling the 40,000 tons produced in the entire world in 2008. Makers and buyers of polysilicon products, however, ignored the true costs of manufacturing in China.
Production of the polysilicon ingots involves superheating quartzite gravel or crushed quartz to create silicon. Subsequent heating and “doping” with chemicals sheds as much as 80 percent of the initial metallurgical grade silicon. A highly toxic byproduct of the process is silicon tetrachloride. Subsequent phases of production require the use of poisonous solvents that only become more harmful after they interact with the silicon. One of the byproducts is fluoride, which, in great doses is harmful. High concentrations of fluoride found in river water were the catalyst for the townsfolk of Haining to go on a rampage of the Jinko Solar plant. Manufacturing of the final product, however, requires yet more chemistry.
Production of the actual cells that workers piece together to create solar panels involves slicing the PV ingots into thin wafers. The cutting equipment uses an abrasive slurry applied to a fine wire to “grease” the slicing process. The slurry is a mixture of glycol and powdered silicon carbide that operators pump into the wire-saw machine. The used slurry contains super-fine particles of silicon, called kerf. Sawing sloughs as much as 50 percent of the ingot into the slurry and the water used to rinse the wafers. If wafering operations choose to recycle instead of discharging the used slurry into the surrounding countryside, they often hire third-party contractors to carry off truckloads of the stuff to recapture reusable materials. However, little is known about the chemicals and the disposal processes Chinese contractors use to separate the slurry “wheat” from the more toxic chemical “chaff.” Many contractors simply pile up bags of the processed, chemical-laden slurry on their properties.
American managers at CRS Reprocessing Services, based in Louisville Kentucky, were absolutely salivating about the potential of the Chinese market when I met them in Shanghai in 2010. Since 2003 CRS had been cleaning up after PV makers in America, Europe, and Japan, and was just breaking into China. The company builds the equipment and implements the processes needed to recycle chemical slurry for re-use. The company claims a 98 percent re-capture rate. Prospects for growth for the company in the China market were huge, as, according to CRS, Chinese PV makers had, until a recent change in government policy, been pouring the poisonous slurry into plastic bags they piled up in the back of their factory compounds. One CRS director told me of a potential Chinese customer of theirs who had so much of the slurry built up “you could actually see the dump from satellite photos, if you knew where to look.” It’s the waste that can’t be easily detected by any other means than human suffering, however, that has caused the greatest media scandal.
Villagers called out the polysilicon maker Luoyang Zhonggui in 2008 after farmers were fainting in their fields from the white powder factory workers were dumping on their plots. Factory owners simply eliminated waste management and recycling equipment and processes to save on the high energy costs of heating the fusing chambers to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, and on the prices of chemicals made more expensive by the increased number of polysilicon makers jumping in on the ground floor of a rising industry. Profits marginalized the people in the village of Gaolong, Henan Province near the Yellow River. Analysts believed Luoyang Zhonggui, though, was merely representative of the vast majority of polysilicon foundries put into operation practically overnight in China.4 The factory’s understanding and implementation of technology pioneered 50 years before by the German company Siemens was incomplete, so the Chinese national research institute that established the Luoyang Zhonggui plant augmented German know-how with their own groping. Local and national government hopes were that the manufacturing processes developed for the Luoyang Zhonggui plant would serve as the anchor for a solar power supply chain in the area. Instead, the factory site served as ground zero for dangerous levels of land and water pollution. Factory staff was dumping liquid silicon tetrachloride waste in the fields farmers tended.
Soil samples showed high concentrations of chlorine and hydrochloric acid, which do not exist naturally. The chemicals are byproducts of the breakdown of silicon tetrachloride. Chemical decomposition released a mix of acids and poisonous hydrogen chloride gas. The gas made breathing difficult, sometimes causing dizziness.5 The fine dust remaining from evaporation collected in the lungs and guts of residents. Crops wilted under blankets of a white dust and water kettles materialized small rocks as water boiled away in them. The degree of human suffering rivaled cases of lead poisoning in China, another by-product of the good intentions of cleantech. Production of the lead-based batteries that go into China’s electric bikes, however, was causing an epidemic throughout the country that local governments found difficult to curb.
Get the Lead Out
My American guest, a middle-aged woman from the United States, looked on admiringly at the flow of electric bike (e-bike) traffic that flowed past us on the busy downtown Suzhou street. Suzhou, my adopted home in China, lays about 150 kilometers west of Shanghai, and has an average income level nearly equal that of Shanghai. Still, the city of Suzhou, with only about 1.5 million residents—small by Chinese standards—retains a parochial feel. Most of the streets in the city and outlying economic development zones still have bike lanes. Fume-belching cars glut the narrow streets within the ancient moat of the city and spill outward to suburban compounds. However, car purchase and maintenance still lay beyond the reach of average residents. My guest commented on how environmentally conscious the Chinese seemed to be by riding the e-bikes instead of motorcycles or cars. Of course, economics, policy, and human laziness had more to do with the transition from bicycle to e-bike. Chinese were growing richer and wanted to get to places faster and with less of their own physical energy to invest.
Since the 1950s China has been famous for the sheer number of bicycles that plied the streets of every paved road and rutted dirt path in the socialist country. The bicycle represented the most egalitarian of transport means—the workers, the farmers, the intellectuals, and the cadres all got to work or shopped by bicycle. Only apparatchiks of the highest levels had automobiles assigned to them. At its height, the Chinese market for bicycles boasted 500 million bicycles.
In 1999 I had the pleasure to cycle with thousands of Chinese along broad bike lanes in Beijing unimpeded by the onslaught of automobiles. It’s easy to experience quietude as one cyclist among thousands of others. Camaraderie finds you as you enter conversation with a stranger alongside whom you’ve been pedaling for several miles. By 2011, however, nearly 150 million of those cyclists had turned in their Flying Pigeon brand bicycles for e-bikes, up from a mere 200,000 in 2001.6 Private car ownership in China hit the 100 million mark at the same time. E-bikes, though, cost between US$250 and US$400 to buy, and one RMB a day to charge the battery.7The affordability of e-bikes assures sales will still grow nearly 20 percent per year through the following decade. The environmental and health costs of e-bike ownership, however, are far out-of-sight of Chinese consumers.
Double-digit growth in the production and consumption of e-bikes has contributed hugely to a lead poisoning problem in China. Ninety-eight percent of all electric bikes run on lead-acid technologies; the remaining market uses nickel-metal-hydride and lithium-ion batteries, which are relatively non-polluting.8 Christopher Cherry, a professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, cited that batteries made in China that contain 22 pounds of lead can create about 15 pounds of lead pollution.9 He said e-bikes during their lifetimes can use up to five batteries. “Electric bikes result in far more emissions of lead than automobiles,” Cherry added. “They always use more batteries per mile than almost any other vehicle.”10 Though the batteries are supposed to be recyclable, it is difficult to know what really happens to the lead in the old batteries as recycling happens in small, garage-like establishments on city streets.
In 2006, it was estimated that 34 percent of children in China had levels of lead in their blood that exceeded World Health Organization standards.11 In the latter half of 2009 local citizen revolts forced local authorities throughout China to reveal six lead poisoning scandals. Excessive levels of lead in the blood stream can cause seizures, coma, and, eventually, death. Lead poisoning can also harm the nervous and reproductive systems. Villages saw most of their children stricken with lead poisoning from air and water emissions from nearby battery plants. A total of about 3,300 youngsters in Shaanxi, Hunan, Yunnan, Fujian, and Henan provinces who lived near lead smelters of battery factories were found to have dangerously high levels of lead in their blood.12 In town after town children’s blood samples registered three to five times the amount of lead considered hazardous to health. Lead poisoning is the leading cause of geographical clusters of cancer in China.
Wang Jingzhong, vice director of the China Battery Industry Association, told the Wall Street Journal that the e-bike battery industry had grown by 20 percent a year since 2005, with no end in sight. He cited some 2,000 factories and 1,000 battery-recycling plants in the country. Wang Jingzhong added, “It is a chaotic situation.”13 In 2011, China had about 2,300 e-bike and e-scooter makers buying the lead-acid products from battery makers. The fragmentation of the industry contributed to an epidemic of lead-poisoning incidents that, along with industry growth, saw little hope for immediate relief.
In December 2009 Guangzhou authorities in southern China closed down a battery factory after they acknowledged 25 children living near the plant had excessive lead levels in their blood.14A month later Jiangsu province saw more than 50 children and as many adults who lived by the Dafeng Shengxiang Power Supply Co. Ltd. battery factory in Hekou village suffer lead poisoning.15 Weeks after the Hekou incident, south of Jiangsu province, in Hubei province, authorities announced 30 people—including 16 children—had been found to have excessive levels of lead in their blood. Local authorities in that instance actually ordered a halt in production at the Hubei Jitong Battery Company.16A hospital in January 2011 tested 280 children who lived in Gaohe Township in Huaining County. Two hundred had high levels of lead in their blood. The township is in Anhui province, about a three-hour drive west of Shanghai. Most of the children lived in a village called Xinshan, which sheltered two lead battery factories—the Borui Battery Co. Ltd. and the Guangfa Battery Plant.17 In the first four months of 2011 police arrested nearly 75 people involved in producing lead-based products, and purportedly closed hundreds of smelters and battery factories.18 Closing the doors of a factory in China, however, doesn’t necessarily mean closed for business.
Migrant worker Xiang Hongfen and her husband found out that their employer Guangfa Battery Plant had poisoned their 12-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son. The local county government declared the Guangfa plant and a battery plant in neighboring Borui village closed. Xiang Hongfen and her husband, though, were both directed to continue working at Guangfa factory, which was actually still conducting business.19 Neither the company nor the local government would pay for the family’s medical bills. The government used the excuse that the family’s residence permits (hukou) were from another city, making them ineligible for health coverage locally. With no other work to be found in the poor district, the couple continued the life-threatening labor. The relationship between the local government and the battery factories often goes beyond ignoring suspension orders. Sometimes, there is a level of collusion that foils attempts at effective enforcement of regulations meant to protect local residents.
For instance, Guo Linyu worked at the Dafeng Shengxiang Power Supply Co. Ltd. as a battery maker. He told The China Daily in 2010, “The Company was informed in advance of any visit [from health and safety inspectors]. Each time an environment department official was about to check the factory, our boss would tell us to stop working and start cleaning the workshops.”20 The Haijiu battery factory also illustrated the cozy relationship between business and government. Environmental regulation enforcement at the Haijiu battery factory was patchy at best. However, the operation passed every inspection for six years running during the first decade of the new century. Shen Yulin, the environmental protection director for the area, said he had only 65 inspectors to cover more than 2,000 factories across 400 square miles.21 For six years workers repeatedly checked into the local hospital for illnesses related to lead poisoning. Authorities did not censure Haijiu until a revolt by local residents in the spring of 2011 raised the issue beyond the ability of the town to cover up the epidemic.22 Zhejiang residents who lived near the Suji e-bike battery factory would find that a familiar story.
The Suji e-bike battery factory was located in the countryside near the ancient resort city of Hangzhou. Since 2005 the business had been providing on the order of 1,000 jobs to the agricultural outpost. The tax revenues and additional largesse paid to local officials made them giddy with the area’s new-found wealth. Ye Cai’e, who lived near the Suji battery plant, said that local officials threatened, “Whoever makes noise will not receive compensation or medical treatment.”23 Nevertheless, the owner’s dark relationships with local officials were not enough to protect him from charges of malfeasance leveled by central government authorities. It took the lead poisoning of 53 children and 120 adults and a high-visibility protest in 2011 to force Beijing to intervene on behalf of the victims in the area.
The end of 2011 saw the foreign enterprise community in China rocked by a scandal related to lead poisoning. Shanghai authorities closed the operations of American battery maker Johnson Controls and 14 other lead smelters in the municipality. Johnson Controls had purchased the plant from a local Chinese businessman in 2005. Shanghai officials had closed the Pudong district plant after back-to-school medical examinations of 25 children detected high levels of lead in their blood. The government had chosen to slow local economic development slightly by closing the other plants, as they were finding it difficult to pinpoint the exact source of the contamination. Johnson Controls, a Tier-1 supplier to Global 500 automotive makers, responded to the investigation by saying their plant was run along more stringent standards than even Chinese regulations met.24 In February 2012 Johnson Controls announced they would permanently close the plant. The answer to lead poisoning from e-bike battery production, recycling, and disposal, many say, lays in a move to Lithium-ion batteries. Lithium-ion is the basis of the technology promoted in other, larger electric vehicles like automobiles, vans, and buses. Lithium and its rare earth relatives, though, have their own dirty secrets.
Rare Earths, Common Pollution
Lithium-ion technology is more expensive to implement than the lead-based approach to battery making. Lithium-ion technologies can mean the end of most of the battery makers and the e-bike retailers in China’s cut-throat marketplace. Higher environmental standards, however, gradually forced e-bike makers who wanted to break into Western markets to adopt lithium-ion technology. The rare earth element lithium, though—like its cousins at the bottom of the periodical table of elements—are buried in layers of radioactive geological and political detritus.
Lithium, neodymium, dysprosium, europium, lanthanum, terbium, cerium, and other rare earth minerals are key to the production of a host of cleantech, consumer electronic, and even military defense applications. Lithium, for instance, is the foundation of the chemical reactions at the heart of electric vehicles meant to replace traditional petrol-burning transport. Neodymium is used to build the high-strength magnets that help generate electricity in wind power turbines and high-power motors in electric vehicles. The motor in each wind power turbine needs about one ton of neodymium to generate one megawatt of power, enough to power 100,000 American-style homes.25 Dysprosium is crucial in the manufacture of hard disks in computers, and also in the composition of magnets used to propel electric vehicles. Europium oxide is central to the production of compact fluorescent light bulbs, meant to replace energy-greedy incandescent bulbs. Cerium and palladium will become increasingly important components in the manufacture of low-cost catalytic converters to reduce the amount of carbon-emissions cars belch. The switch to cerium and palladium will matter more greatly than ever as China and India adopt American-style car cultures. Despite the name of the family of elements, rare earth minerals may be as abundant in the earth’s crust as copper and lead, according to the British Geological Survey.26
China was able to corner the market in rare earth minerals as part of a national plan set in motion at the end of the 1990s. The country produced the ores at such a low cost that mines in the United States and Australia were unable to compete. The governments of the United States and Australia, in particular, actively chose to support closure of the mines in the early 2000s and cede market leadership to the Chinese. China has 37 percent of the world’s estimated reserves, about 36 million tons. However, China came to control more than 97 percent of production. Post-Soviet bloc countries have nearly 20 million tons of rare earth resources, while the United States has almost 15 million tons. Australia, India, Brazil, and Malaysia also have large deposits of the ores.27 Greater use of rare earth metals to reduce fossil fuel pollution, however, instead excavates a different sort of pollution—and a conundrum for environmental activists.
Rare earth miners pump sulfuric acid into the ground to wash the rare earths from the clay and dirt binding them. Operators rinse the rare earth deposits with yet more acid and chemicals to separate the rare earths from each other. The acid baths drain into the ground, seeping into ground water and into nearby streams and lakes. The poisons, however, are not just chemical in nature, but also radioactive. The effects of the pollution on the lives of local residents are devastating.
For instance, Baishazhen, a village in Guangdong province, near Hong Kong, became a favorite site for local mafia to strip mine in 2005.28 At the time, all the world’s gadget makers had supply chains snaking through the region. Also, China and other international champions in the wind power market began increasing production of wind turbines. Soon after Baishazhen became an entrepot for the trafficking of rare earth minerals, rivers that were once clean and clear ran muddy, foul, and toxic. Lakes retained cocktails of toxic solvents, killing off all animal and plant life in them and surrounding them. Baishazen had been Mr. Song’s home his entire life.
The 81-year-old farmer witnessed the streams that ran past the walled compound in which he lived become fetid and clouded, undrinkable.29 Guangdong provincial government officials claimed the chemical run-off had poisoned thousands of acres of otherwise productive farmland. Any plants Mr. Song and other residents cultivated near polluted streams quickly died. Even his well smelled of the acids the illegal miners used to excavate the rare earths. In mid-2011 the central government took steps to stop the illegal mining interests in south China. However, China’s far northern frontiers were an entirely different story. State-directed development of open-air lakes of corrosive toxins to catch rare earth mining run-off was the rule, literally.
Inner Mongolia harbors one of the richest deposits of rare earth minerals in the world. Since the mid-1980s a vast city-sized industrial complex has grown up in the city of Baotou, perpetually shrouded by a fog of noxious vapor and dust. Squads of helmeted security guards patrol the area to keep the curious at bay and to squelch any potential dissent from residents who band together to protest their toxic home. Perhaps more poisonous than the production facilities themselves is the artificial reservoir of waste that tails off from the operations. By 2010 the lake had grown to become five miles wide and 100 feet deep, spreading three feet annually. Rare earth refinement operations pumped 7 million tons of deadened, poisoned earth into the poorly constructed lake every year. Poor quality construction saw the toxins leeching into the ground to contaminate the water tables upon which farmers depended to irrigate their crops. Residents also bathed and cooked their food with the poisoned water.30
The nearby village of Dalahai has suffered extraordinarily from the pollutants. Mr. Su Bairen told visitors about the artificial lake, “It turned into a mountain that towered over us. Anything we planted just withered, then our animals started to sicken and die.” The residents themselves suffered from respiratory illnesses while their hair turned preternaturally white and their teeth fell out. Cancer rates increased dramatically and generations born after the construction of the lake were born with soft bones. Studies performed in the late 2000s on the area determined the reservoir emitted ten times the amount of radiation of the surrounding area. The length of time that this level of environmental degradation and human poisoning had been going on with local and central government sanction casted doubt on China’s claim that it restricted the export of rare earth minerals for the sake of the environment and livability.
In the autumn of 2010, China protested against Japan’s incarceration of a Chinese fishing trawler that had rammed Japanese coast guard vessels. Beijing placed an embargo on the export of its rare earths to Japan. Throughout most of 2011 the central government chose to keep the pressure on international markets by placing export quotas that were 30 percent less than what they had been the year before. The restrictions heavily impacted the bottom lines of American and European cleantech and electronic appliance manufacturers. Foreign governments lodged a complaint with the World Trade Organization that China was hording rare earths for its own industries. Beijing claimed that it had to rationalize the rare earths mining industry for the levels of pollution the informal mines were creating.
Much like the country’s coal mining industry, the central government was finding that supporting illegal rare earth mining was reaching a point of diminishing returns. Illegal coal mines in China’s north had claimed the lives of thousands of workers through mining accidents, and shortened the lives of tens of thousands more through the inhalation of carcinogenic dust. The central government directed the buyout or forced closure of hundreds of the mercenary coal mines to reduce the number of accidents that were embarrassing to the country. Beijing also began implementing measures to increase productivity in legal coal mines and reduce pollution and destruction of the local land and surrounding communities. Foreign companies and governments remained unconvinced by Beijing’s defense of its coal mine restrictions on the export of rare earth minerals.
Foreign producers of cleantech and consumer electronics already had known for years that China intended to dominate the sectors worldwide. Closer to home, the country published in its 5-year plan that it would accelerate its development of wind turbines by 2015. Country planners also envisioned a million electric vehicles on Chinese roads by the year 2020. In the name of energy efficiency, China was increasingly pushing its consumers to invest in compact fluorescent light bulbs, as well. The technologies, though, all required amounts of rare earth minerals in quantities ranging from a fraction of an ounce to tons for each unit produced. Production requirements added up to mountains of the substance for which no tax existed to rationalize its use. Material prices did not reflect true costs when safety and environmental considerations were factored in. Government policy in no way incentivized nor underwrote research into alternative materials that were less despoiling of the environment and less dangerous to human health.
China’s move to restrict export of rare earths prompted the United States and Australia to have their domestic rare earth mines shipping ore before 2015. Analysts expected rare earth mines in North Vietnam to expand their operations, as well. Though the price of rare earths from China quadrupled in the five years prior to 2010, the new sources will likely decrease the spot price of the minerals on international markets. Increased mining and lower material costs will probably encourage production of yet more cleantech meant to protect the environment. Unfortunately, the means by which miners in China extracted rare earths achieved exactly the opposite result: rape of the land and the gradual poisoning of local residents. Much the same can be said of the production of solar power cells and the batteries in electric bicycles, as well. Cleantech production in China is in dire need of review and enforced revision.
When There Is No Longer a Backyard
The concept of clean and renewable energy is laudable: essentially, energy for free developed with technologies that on balance are good for Mother Nature. The promise of cleantech is that perhaps societies may even leave the earth a bit better off than in the age of fossil fuel use. The reality, however, is that the Industrial Revolution worldview coupled with a vicarious approach to consumption is also poisoning the planet. Certainly, China’s leadership, in its rush to become wealthy and regain stature in the world as a superpower, is culpable in the extent to which it is disregarding the health and welfare of its own people. The country is also harming its future as more children are born with health defects that make them wards of the State, instead of fully capable contributors to society. Willful greed, negligence, ignorance, and complacency on the part of local governments, law enforcement, environmental protection agencies, mafia, and tycoons alike have turned millions of acres of the country into no-man’s lands, uninhabitable for generations. Silicate solvents, toxic slurries, lead refining processes, and rare earth extraction methods are levying hidden costs to society. Future generations, however, will have to pay the price for the country’s impatient modernization. China, however, is not the only country culpable. Other countries have or are committing crimes against Nature and communities in the name of “clean” energy.
Developed nations like the United States, Germany, and Denmark have shifted production of cleantech products from their own countries to China. The developed countries have for years had environmental regulations on their books that either outright prohibit refinement of the materials their cleantech required, or that make production prohibitively expensive to source and build domestically. Environmental and human welfare considerations observed in other countries and attendant costs are a prime reason the Chinese were able to undercut prices for rare earths on the world market: flagrant disregard for safety and environmental concerns trumped the true economic cost of intensive mining. Eventually, though, societies and corporations must bear the expense, arguably far more costly than if shareholders and government interests had invested in a sustainable approach to excavation at the outset.
For instance, in 2011, Mitsubishi, the Japanese conglomerate, became mired in a US$100 million investment to clean up the Bukit Merah rare earths mine in Malaysia. Nearly a dozen people in the village developed leukemia after mining began, most of who died from the cancer. Project managers expected the cleanup to require 11,000 truckloads of radioactive earth to be entombed atop a nearby hill. The effort also required storing 80,000 steel barrels of slurry. Large-scale cleanups of lead-laced sites, silicate tailings, and slurry dumps will prove a major expense to companies and local governments in China. Instead, the highest priority for shareholders seems to be to get rich as quickly as possible before the total cost of ignoring pollution issues becomes prohibitive. In some instances the price includes a quorum of residents dying of poisoning. The deaths and illnesses force the local residents to revolt en masse to embarrass government and business interests to remediate the violations. Sustainability of the processes that go into the production of cleantech—no matter the country of origin—is becoming an increasingly important issue for the world to confront.
The planet is running out of habitable space as the population looks to top the 9 billion mark by the year 2050. Narrower confines, unbreathable air, and toxic water will move from becoming important environmental challenges to critical social issues. Societies—no matter the level of economic development—will have to grapple with the monetary and human costs of clinging to the Industrial Revolution model of modernization. The crude excavation of natural resources to produce energy and the materials to maintain our standards of living are becoming increasingly problematic. Sustainability now is a buzzword—a fluffy, fuzzy concept that current economic theory ignores. The discipline of economics is still heavily based in the outmoded worldview of Adam Smith. Economics and modern concepts of wealth would certainly be different if humans took into account the actual—not subsidized—costs of living in a closed system. We live in an ecosystem called Earth.
Government subsidies and preferential treatment for natural resource extraction and processing give the illusion that alternative sources of energy are uneconomical. Within the constraints of current economic theory it would certainly seem the case. A truer accounting would include the costs to the environment of unsound mining and manufacturing processes. Calculations would also take into consideration the social costs of carrying communities that are no longer able to function because of poisoning. Then, the modern world will have a truer picture of what humanity will still be on the hook for in repaying its debt to the Earth. China’s payment on the loan it has taken out from Nature will come due sooner than it thinks.
An over-crowded country like China never had many backyards from which local residents could refuse admittance to highly polluting mining, refining, and production processes. Eventually, under the current industrialization model, one form of heavy pollution or another in China will come from someone’s backyard. The fact is as unavoidable as a cloud crossing a city line, a breeze blowing through a chain link fence, or a river coursing through the countryside. The increasing frequency and size of protests against environmental effronteries is an indicator that the Chinese are becoming aware of their codependence on their local ecosystems. The rash of lead poisonings of children in 2011 within the Shanghai municipality strikes at the heart of the affluent in the country. Pollution in China refuses the constraints of geography and class. Nature has begun to tell the nation’s citizens they have something to lose if they continue to account for their production and consumption habits through off-balance sheet chicanery that hides the true upfront costs of modernization with industrial revolution characteristics.
That so much of the world’s production has been transplanted to China is speeding the country’s recognition of the true meaning and intent of environmental sustainability. The United States, with its very large backyards, relatively low population density, and transplantation of much of its dirty industry abroad will be slower than China to act on rebalancing the books Nature has been keeping. The country has the potential to bolt ahead of the United States in addressing issues involving pollution and natural resource exhaustion. Increasingly, China must take into account the total cost of applying Industrial Revolution thinking in developing its society. As new environmental and energy issues arise, so too must a new way of thinking about modern society’s relationship with Nature.
Notes
1. Ariana Eunjung Cha, “Solar Energy Firms Leave Waste Behind in China,” The Washington Post, March 9, 2008.
2. Ibid.
3. “Toward a Just and Sustainable Solar Industry, A Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition Whitepaper,” January 14, 2009.
4. Ariana Eunjung Cha, “Solar Energy Firms Leave Waste Behind in China,” The Washington Post, March 9, 2008.
5. Ibid.
6. Austin Ramsey, “On the Streets of China, Electric Bikes Are Swarming,” Time Magazine, June 14, 2009. Available online at www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1904334,00.html#ixzz1aLgPp54y.
7. “China Drives Electric Bike, Scooter Boom,” MSNBC, July 27, 2009. Available online at www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32172301/ns/world_news-world_environment/t/china-drives-electric-bike-scooter-boom/#.TpJey3JqnIV.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Jane Spencer and Nicholas Casey, “Toy Recall Shows Challenge China Poses to Partners,” August 3, 2007. Available online at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118607762324386327.html.
12. Hu Yongqi, “Lead Poison Factory ‘Tipped Off’ about Green Checks,” China Daily, January 13, 2010. Available online at www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010–01/13/content_9311412.htm.
13. James T. Areddy, “Shanghai Closes Plants Using Lead,” Wall Street Journal, October 5, 2011. Available online at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203791904576610230760888692.html.
14. “24 Children Hospitalized for Lead Poisoning in E China,” China Daily, January 6, 2011. Available online at www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2011–01/06/content_11800307.htm.
15. Hu Yongqi, “Lead Poison Factory ‘Tipped Off’ about Green Checks,” China Daily, January 13, 2010. Available online at www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010–01/13/content_9311412.htm.
16. “Lead Poisoning Sickens 16 Children in Central China,” China Daily, June 12, 2010. Available online at www.chinadaily.com.cn/2010–06/12/content_9968401.htm.
17. “Battery Plant Blamed for Lead Poisoning,” China Daily, January 6, 2011. Available online at www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/2011–01/06/content_11805198.htm.
18. “China Shuts Battery Factories Due to Lead Poisoning,” BBC, May 30, 2011. Available online at www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13594890.
19. “Battery Plant Blamed for Lead Poisoning,” China Daily, January 6, 2011. Available online at www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/2011–01/06/content_11805198.htm.
20. Hu Yongqi, “Lead Poison Factory ‘Tipped Off’ about Green Checks,” China Daily, January 13, 2010. Available online at www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010–01/13/content_9311412.htm.
21. Sharon LaFraniere, “Lead Poisoning in China: The Hidden Scourge,” New York Times, June 15, 2011. Available online at www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/world/asia/15lead.html?pagewanted=all.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. James T. Areddy, “Shanghai Closes Plants Using Lead,” Wall Street Journal, October 5, 2011. Available online at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203791904576610230760888692.html.
25. Michael Montgomery, “Rare Earths: Common Applications,” Rare Earth Investing News, August 3, 2010. Available online at http://rareearthinvestingnews.com/investing-in-rare-earths/rare-earths-common-applications/.
26. Suzanne Goldenberg, “Rare Earth Metals Mine is Key to US Control over Hi-Tech Future,” The Guardian, December 26, 2010. Available online at www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/dec/26/rare-earth-metals-us.
27. Ibid.
28. Keith Bradsher, “Main Victims of Mines Run by Gangsters Are Peasants,” New York Times, December 30, 2010. Available online at www.nytimes.com/2010/12/30/business/global/30smugglebar.html?ref=global.
29. Ibid.
30. Simon Perry and Ed Douglas, “In China, the True Cost of Britain’s Clean, Green Wind Power Experiment: Pollution on a Disastrous Scale,” Daily Mail, January 29, 2011. Available online at www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1350811/In-China-true-cost-Britains-clean-green-wind-power-experiment-Pollution-disastrous-scale.html#ixzz1acZ2q0Z8ii.