The Secret Ingredients of Everything is a new National Geographic feature about rare earth elements—metals that aren’t really so much rare, as scattered and difficult to separate out. But neither of those things is really the problem people are worried about. Instead, it’s this: Right now, China has a monopoly on the world’s supply of rare earth elements. And solving that problem isn’t as simple as just cranking up production ourselves, because mining rare earth elements comes with some side-effects that Americans probably don’t want happening in their backyards, even if they do want the gadgets that mining makes possible.
Although China currently monopolizes rare earth mining, other countries have deposits too. China has 48 percent of the world’s reserves; the United States has 13 percent. Russia, Australia, and Canada have substantial deposits as well. Until the 1980s, the United States led the world in rare earth production, thanks largely to the Mountain Pass mine.”There was a time we were producing 20,000 tons a year when the market was 30,000 tons,” says Smith. “So we were 60-plus percent of the world’s market.”
American dominance ended in the mid 1980s. China, which for decades had been developing the technology for separating rare earths (not easy to do because they’re chemically so similar), entered the world market with a roar. With government support, cheap labor, and lax or nonexistent environmental regulations, its rare earth industries undercut all competitors. The Mountain Pass mine closed in 2002, and Baotou, a city in Inner Mongolia (an autonomous region of China), became the world’s new rare earth capital. Baotou’s mines hold about 80 percent of China’s rare earths, says Chen Zhanheng, director of the academic department of the Chinese Society of Rare Earths in Beijing. But Baotou has paid a steep price for its supremacy. Some of the most environmentally benign and high-tech products turn out to have very dirty origins indeed.
Rare earth mines often also contain radioactive elements, such as uranium and thorium. Villagers near Baotou reportedly have been relocated because their water and crops have been contaminated with mining wastes. Every year the mines near Baotou produce about ten million tons of wastewater, much of it either highly acidic or radioactive, and nearly all of it untreated. Chen maintains that the Chinese government is making an effort to clean up the industry.