In Baotou, Inner Mongolia, stands one of the world's leading rare earth processing plants — minerals that are indispensable for high-tech devices and carry a heavy environmental impact.
The landscape looks as though it has come straight out of a science fiction film set in a dystopian future: chimneys and cooling towers rise up towards the sky, pouring grey smoke into the atmosphere, blending with the leaden clouds, while not far away lies an artificial lake, brimming with dense toxic sludge.
We are in a remote corner of Inner Mongolia, in Baotou — a part of the world one might expect to find pristine and wild — where the storage facilities of Baotou Steel Rare-Earth stand, a company involved in the extraction of what are known as rare earths. It is from this hellish circle on earth that the materials feeding our thirst for technology come.
Rare earths are chemical elements essential for producing many high-technology goods, from smartphones to tablets, from television screens to hybrid cars, and they have numerous applications in the field of defence and armaments. They are in fact metals, and they are not all that rare; what is rare, however, are deposits large and concentrated enough to make extraction viable.
China meets 97 per cent of global demand for rare earths and is able to set prices and control supply on international markets. Baotou is the largest industrial city in Inner Mongolia and one of the world's leading suppliers of rare earths. These minerals have played a decisive role in China's explosive economic growth over recent decades.
Baotou, according to those who have witnessed it, looks like a frontier town, similar to those that sprang up during the gold rush of the last century. In 1950, before intensive extraction began, the city had a population of 97,000; today it is home to over two and a half million people. The environmental impact that the "rare earth rush" has had on the city is painfully evident.
The Baotou Steel Rare-Earth complex appears to merge with the city itself: long pipes emerge from the ground and run along roads and pavements, and the streets are constantly traversed by enormous lorries. When it rains, the puddles and rivulets that form are as black as pitch, stained by the coal dust that pervades everything, and the air is thick with the smell of sulphur. The skyline is jagged with skyscrapers, vast car parks, electricity pylons and the flaming towers of the refinery.
Many rare earths, such as neodymium and cerium, are actually fairly common and evenly distributed around the world. China holds only 30 per cent of the world's neodymium deposits, yet produces 90 per cent of that used by the global market. How can this discrepancy be explained?
By the high toxicity and hazardousness of the processes involved in extracting and processing these minerals, which generate enormous quantities of toxic waste. China is therefore the world leader in the sector not so much because of greater mineral wealth, but because of a lesser concern for the serious health and environmental consequences that this industry entails.
The contradiction is sharpened by the fact that rare earths are not only used to produce consumer electronics — they are also needed for certain green technologies such as wind turbines and electric cars. The major companies that manufacture high-tech devices regularly release ever more advanced products, rendering previous devices obsolete within a matter of months and encouraging a continuous race towards the new.
Yet all of this comes at a price, one that is paid far from our eyes, in remote corners of the planet, such as Baotou.