13 ms·

A toxic, nightmarish lake created by our thirst for tech

222 points by soperj 6y ago

metissec98 6y ago
The question I think needs to be answered is how we can move the market forces to move away from such harmful practices? I think this is a symptom of much larger geopolitical and economic issues.
- lambdasquirrel 6y ago
  - Apple is using 100% recycled rare earths in their upcoming iPhones, but they are just one manufacturer out of many. - No one has really figured out how to extract the elements out of phones after they have been manufactured. - We don't yet know how to recycle solar panels either.
  - tshoaib 6y ago
    100% only for the magnets, but it's still a great improvement
  - nix23 6y ago
    >Apple is using 100% recycled rare earths in their upcoming iPhones Where is it recycled and how much more energy the recycling uses?
    - saurik 6y ago
      Rare earth metals are rare; it isn't an energy tradeoff as it isn't like we are synthesizing this stuff... it is a "eventually we run out" situation (and presumably a lot sooner than oil, with less ability to swap in replacements).
      - adventured 6y ago
        > Rare earth metals are rare; it isn't an energy tradeoff ... it is a "eventually we run out" situation Rare earth metals are mostly not rare. The vast majority of rare earths are plentiful. We're not going to run out of the most useful rare earths for hundreds of years at a minimum. It's the extraction and processing that is a problem (environmentally), not the scarcity factor. The US for example is loaded with rare earths and has barely even scratched the surface of its supply (the same is true of Canada and Australia); there has been a lack of interest in rare earth mining in the US for the past several decades because of how intense and dirty the process of extraction and processing is. > The rare earths are a relatively abundant group of 17 elements composed of scandium, yttrium, and the lanthanides. The elements range in crustal abundance from cerium, the 25th most abundant element of the 78 common elements in the Earth's crust at 60 parts per million, to thulium and lutetium, the least abundant rare-earth elements at about 0.5 part per million. https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/rare-earths-statistics-and-information https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/rare-earths-statistics-and... > The "rare" in the name of this group of elements is actually somewhat misleading; the U.S. Geological Survey describes them as "relatively abundant in the Earth's crust." https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dont-panic-about-rare-earth-elements/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dont-panic-about-... https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/rare-earth-elements-not-rare-just-playing-hard-to-get-38812856/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/rare-earth-ele...
      - nix23 6y ago
        >Rare earth metals are rare; No one said that...an exaclty because of that i am no shure if recycling is better or worse for the environment.
    - yazaddaruvala 6y ago
      Apple is also moving their energy to renewable sources for all of their facilities, their partners, and I believe their partners' partners. They are not just pushing renewable sources with the partners and partners' partners, but are also pushing for Carbon neutral. With that plan meant to hit "zero/negative footprint by 2030" I find myself feeling less and less guilty about buying their products and returning the "not yet old" versions. And in 2030, I'd be happy to pay Apple the incremental extra $ for the guilt free experience.
      - nix23 6y ago
        >And in 2030, I'd be happy to pay Apple the incremental extra $ for the guilt free experience. Gosh you really belief in that right?
        yazaddaruvala 6y ago
        I mean, it is aspirational and 10 years away. So they could be wrong and not hit the goal. Beyond that, yes I buy iPhones anyways and so will trust Apple at their word until some new agency does a deep dive and provides the counterfactual data. Or if over 10 years, Apple erodes the trust they have built with me.
        nix23 6y ago
        Yeah maybe first let others fix your apple products so you dont have to buy a new one every 3 years...THAT would be the first step. BTW: stop trust a company...thats what religion is for...and if you live in a really good place the goverment...but NEVER a Company
        lolsal 6y ago
        Given the other options, it's a vote with my wallet for the kind of world I want.
- ianmobbs 6y ago
  Through legislation. Market forces don’t care about the environment, just profitability. That’s where the government is supposed to come in...
  - bilbo0s 6y ago
    I don't know man? Can't legislate physics. At some point, people are going to need to decide that they shouldn't use some of this stuff. Or maybe make the stuff last longer? Or figure out how to recycle it? Not sure. So many issues from refining through to product lifecycle. (The fact that solar panels cannot be recycled for instance really kills me personally. Like a dagger to my heart.) I don't know what the answer is, but it's clear we have a long way to go.
    - 542354234235 6y ago
      > Can't legislate physics. What does that even mean? You can absolutely legislate the cost to the environment, to health, to sustainability. If making a widget causes $1 trillion in environmental damage to natural resources, legislating that the company is responsible for that damage is the solution. They either innovate to prevent the damage in the first place, raise prices of the product to cover all the costs (which would basically price out products that aren't sustainable), or they go out of business and stop damaging the environment.
- orthecreedence 6y ago
  Stop using markets (or "prices") for allocation. Instead track resource/labor contents of products directly and "price" resources according to their pollution/known externalities. One of the biggest problems we have is that markets can price labor costs effectively, but are terrible at pricing resource/raw material costs. Supply and demand has nothing to do with ecology and known externalities of resources. We should be able to set the costs of fossil fuels directly democratically (and same with rare earth minerals) either on a per-resource basis (if the use of the resource has known costs) or a per-process basis (if the process of extracting the resource has known costs), and have those costs trickle through the economy via companies that are effectively acting in a distributed productive relationship (like a market) but without using prices for allocation. Instead use orders directly, and then have consumers cover the costs of products on purchase, at which point the money they earned from their (negotiated) wages would be destroyed and not circulate the productive economy. Markets can only effectively price resources in a democratic setting. This is impossible in a globalized capitalist system.
najarvg 6y ago
This is a duplicate of a much older HN post - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9317003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9317003 and the linked article is from 2015
- notRobot 6y ago
  It's not a duplicate if the previous discussion was more than a year ago.
  - 0xffff2 6y ago
    It's allowed/encouraged to repost links from time to time, but it's still a duplicate.
    - hombre_fatal 6y ago
      The distinction isn't very useful. This is a forum. I can't even respond to that page of comments. The only thing noteworthy about that HN link is that some interesting comments may have been posted there.
      - andai 6y ago
        Often the original submission will have more comments, and by proportion more of the top comments will be interesting or insightful.
- adwww 6y ago
  Ah, that explains the 'Share on Google+' button I saw then!
speeder 6y ago
The article mentions the pollution there is in part for the construction of "Green" tech, like wind turbines and batteries for solar panels. Are there serious research about how much this "green" tech is actually greener or not? And what are the actually greenest energy we can have right now?
- zdw 6y ago
  There's a ratio of "how much energy can be stored by a device" vs "how much energy did it take to create" graph halfway down this page: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/05/ditch-the-batteries-off-the-grid-compressed-air-energy-storage.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/05/ditch-the-batteries-... TL;DR: Lithium ion batteries have a ratio of around 10:1, whereas compressed air or pumped water are 200:1 or better. This is just storage - I'd be interested in the ratio on solar photovoltaic, wind, or similar power generation tech.
  - StillBored 6y ago
    BTW: Surely for compressed air systems that are pumping into a high pressure container it would be possible to use a vacuum bottle design and solve the heat loss+add problem.
    - jbay808 6y ago
      Along these lines, MIT Prof. Alex Slocum's proposal was to build concrete domes underwater, and evacuate them to store energy / re-fill them to release energy. The pressure difference is the difference between vacuum and hundreds of atmospheres, and there are no compressible working fluids to cause adiabatic heating losses. https://newatlas.com/mit-offshore-wind-concrete-sphere-energy-storage/27357/ https://newatlas.com/mit-offshore-wind-concrete-sphere-energ... (Edit: better link)
  - leafmeal 6y ago
    I was sceptical of this at first. I suspected that the "how much energy can be stored" was only in regards to a single use, but I checked out the source, and this is over the lifetime of the storage medium. It blows my mind that it takes 1/10 of the energy it will ever store to manufacture a lithium ion battery.
lokl 6y ago
Who is investing in R&D of less toxic methods of refining rare earths?
- KiranRao0 6y ago
  I don't know anyone specific, but I've heard about astroid mining as an alternative to mining rare earth metals.
  - nix23 6y ago
    >but I've heard about astroid mining as an alternative to mining rare earth metals Good idea, and lets go to mars so we dont have to care about earth ;)
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- pas 6y ago
  The problem is not hard, I'd even wager to say it's solved. Simply use a lot more filters, basically build big wastewater treatment plants (covered sedimentation tanks, [reverse]osmosis filters, last resort, use closed loops and fractionating columns [like the distillation towers at refineries]), it just takes a lot more energy. Similarly we can make carbon-neutral concrete and steel, it just takes a lot lot lot more energy. And we kind of dropped the ball on energy because of costs. So now we are in a two or more front war for more and clean energy.
FearNotDaniel 6y ago
An interesting point of anecdata is that I didn't choose to upgrade my perfectly good three-year-old smartphone. I was forced to do so by the weight of compulsory upgrades to OS and apps that now make what was once a decent enough product completely unusable. I'm sure the hardware would last several more years if the vendors would allow me to run the same software that was originally installed on it.
- geodel 6y ago
  > weight of compulsory upgrades to OS and apps that now make what was once a decent enough product completely unusable. Software developers and companies alike are very proud of it. I can understand companies defending it due to commercial concerns. But developers defending addition of enormous number of dependencies, bloating the software and calling it best practice to reuse existing components saddens me.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  If there is any individual guilt here, I don't think that would free you from it. Though I'm not very convinced of the individual guilt angle. It's a systemic problem of incentives (lack of good ones).
  - forinti 6y ago
    Look at the countries that were labeled Sustainable Economies in recent years (Cuba and Ecuador). Is there a way to convince people in rich countries to live with the same level of consumption as these countries do? Can you even convince these countries to stay as they are?
    - 542354234235 6y ago
      > Cuba An island nation that the most powerful country in the world has been trying to cripple economically for half a century. > Ecuador A country with a smaller GDP than that majority of US states. These are probably not good or representative examples of how this would work writ large.
  - 6y ago
dade_ 6y ago
Looks like mining to me. While it reminds me of the tailing ponds from the tar sands in Fort McMurray, a real Hell on Earth was Vale SA's tailings dam collapse in Brumadinho that devastated the downstream villages of Bento Rodrigues and Paracatu de Baixo.
Jerry2 6y ago
If you think that "green tech" is "green" or that it somehow eliminates fossil fuels out of the equation, please watch Jeff Gibbs' "Planet of the Humans" documentary. It will open your eyes to how this "green tech" movement really works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q2m_mCIrQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q2m_mCIrQY
- aspenmayer 6y ago
  Here's the actual creator's YT page and full doc. That link is to some other person's page, who doesn't appear involved in the production. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE
- yboris 6y ago
  Thank you for sharing! Amazing!
- ardy42 6y ago
  At 36:50 there's a quite interesting segment that's basically I, Pencil [1] with the moral inverted: https://youtu.be/_Q2m_mCIrQY?t=2210 https://youtu.be/_Q2m_mCIrQY?t=2210 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Pencil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Pencil. I read the original for the first time recently, and was amused that it ended with a rant against the post office.
- sacred_numbers 6y ago
  Before anyone takes this documentary seriously, please do some research. This[1] Wikipedia article is a good starting point, but there are a lot of sources showing how misleading and inaccurate this documentary is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Humans#Factual_accuracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Humans#Factual_a...
  - Jerry2 6y ago
    Before anyone takes above comment seriously, do some investigation of your own. That article is nothing more than a damage control and is completely funded by the "green tech" billionaires. Just look at the history log. If you want to see how far these """green""" tech billionaires have gone to censor and suppress this documentary and what kinds of legal tricks and other pressure they've used, read Max Blumenthal's article. >‘Green’ billionaires behind professional activist network that led suppression of ‘Planet of the Humans’ documentary https://thegrayzone.com/2020/09/07/green-billionaires-planet-of-the-humans/ https://thegrayzone.com/2020/09/07/green-billionaires-planet... Michael Moore also interviewed Max about this amazing investigation into how these rich people censor things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDIEqHGAveA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDIEqHGAveA
carapace 6y ago
I'm a recluse, I don't go anywhere or talk to anyone anyway, so when I lost my smart phone a few years ago I didn't bother to replace it. I think if I still had one this would convince me to get rid of it.
PeterStuer 6y ago
No sorry, it is not 'created by our thirst for tech'. It is cratered by our socioeconomic system that selects for concentrated benefits and externality dumping, no matter what the cost.
davidw 6y ago
A number of years ago, people speculated that as people in China became wealthier, they'd start worrying about things beyond just having food and some nicer goods in their lives, and start pushing for change, including, perhaps, some form of democracy. Things like local environmental disasters could have moved things in that direction, as people tire of the corruption and lack of action. That hasn't happened, sadly.
- elevenoh 6y ago
  Wonder if this (Chinese citizen push for democracy, individual liberties, care for the environment etc.) will come to unfold as a kind of 'dam break' wave of rapid change over a slow-moving change where nodes of conformity are squashed by the collective. Memes spread pretty quick these days.
- wahern 6y ago
  > That hasn't happened, sadly. Why do you say that? From the news I've read over the past 10-20 years, my understanding is that China has steadily increased its emphasis on environmental protection and regulation, for example regarding food safety, air quality, and even nuclear safety (nuclear plants are becoming more expensive to build there, though claims of the industry's death have been extremely premature). Most recently, for example, part of the reason for banning imports of recyclables is because they were piling up and contributing to pollution. It's just that in absolute terms, and relative to the standards of rich industrial countries, China has a lot more ground to still cover. As with domestic news, the fact that you read and hear about these situations is often better understood as evidence that things are getting better, not worse, reflecting a positive shift in attention and emphasis. Especially in a country like China where authorities have far more control over both domestic and foreign reporting--compare the difficulty of substantive reporting on the Ugyhurs.
colechristensen 6y ago
I’m sorry but this just fetishizes environmental disaster. Some reporter is surprised that mining produces waste and writes about it like one small lake is poisoning the planet. Yes it could probably be done better with better environmental standards but waste is waste and setting aside small areas of the planet for it isn’t equivalent to some global catastrophe. So many people seem to be living in this bubble where the only thing they experience is the clean interfaces to civilization and then they talk about the messy bits like the slightest blemish is doom. A dispassionate analysis of the site might have painted a more convincing argument for something being wrong, but as it is, it reads like a melodramatic fainting after seeing some trash. There are plenty of very real environmental issues, but if you sensationalize everything that isn’t pristine natural beauty, it doesn’t matter because your motivations have moved from reason to superstition.
- hinkley 6y ago
  When water was a source of power and transport, we made a habit of building industry right on bodies of water. When we switched to other ways to transport goods and power, we never stopped that tradition and I wonder how harshly future generations are going to judge us for doing so. We aren't using the river, but the river is still the same form of transportation it ever was. We don't barge away the goods, but the river will still happily carry any toxic materials that leave the factory by malice, incompetence, human error, or a series of unfortunate events (Fukushima). I mean at this point, building a factory where you swear not to pollute next to a geographical feature that makes it easy to pollute without getting caught or where any honest mistake is magnified... it feels like a teenager hovering by the display of expensive stuff and saying they are just looking, or playing catch in the living room. You won't be the least surprised when you find out there is something missing/broken. The solution isn't more yelling, it's taking away the temptation to misbehave, and/or reducing the consequences of doing so. We need public policy to build a proverbial glass cabinet around our core watersheds. Build highways, train and powerlines and zone for factories at a slight separation, along on the route between Here and There, where nothing we care about is directly downwind or downhill. Tennessee Valley Authority lost a dam and dumped years of fly ash into a tributary of the Mississippi. It's just a matter of time until deferred maintenance takes out this dam, and the lake remembers it was a river once.
quantified 6y ago
5.5 year old article. Please note with a `(2015)` in the title. I don't imagine it's any better today.
soperj 6y ago
I am still using my galaxy s3. I've got a few broken galaxy s3s that I've harvested for parts when something has gone wrong with my current s3.
- anderspitman 6y ago
  I have an old broken one I'd be happy to mail to you. Contact info in my profile.
  - soperj 6y ago
    thanks man! I'm good at the moment (i have 3 to scrounge parts from), but I do appreciate it. Also your contact info is not actually in your profile currently.
    - anderspitman 6y ago
      Sorry should have been more clear. You can contact me through my website, which is in my profile.
barney54 6y ago
I hoped this was an update from the 2015 article, but this is the article from 2015. I’d like to know if there have been any improvements in China on this issue.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Khaine 6y ago
Its predominantly China's fault. They achieved a monopoly on rare earth metals by undercutting competitors by ignoring safety and environmental practices. Rare earth metals are not rare. They are common, but processing them safely without environmental impact is not cheap. Whenever competitors show up, China floods the market to push down prices to bankrupt them. The world needs to start putting environmental and social tariffs on Chinese goods, to force them to improve environmental standards, and put a stop to human rights abuses.
- im3w1l 6y ago
  > Whenever competitors show up, China floods the market to push down prices to bankrupt them. Maybe governments should take the opportunity to stockpile at that moment. Either the price rises keeping the competitors afloat or you have a nice stockpile. Either way you become immune to shenanigans.
- 08-15 6y ago
  No, it's the Unites States' fault. In 1982 (iirc), the US decided that Thorium is a "source material" for nuclear weapons, even though it very clearly isn't. Since rare earth metals have chemistry very similar to Thorium, they tend to occur together. Anyone who mines REE, ends up with waste Thorium. It's just slightly radioactive, chemically inert sand, but by decree it is a "TENORM" (technically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive material), and by decree, someone stealing it could theoretically build an atomic bomb from it, even though they can't in the real world. So because it's a TENORM, the waste can't go back into the same hole in the ground that it came from. And because it's a "source material", it has to be guarded. And the eventual disposal has to follow all sorts of regulations. All of that is so expensive, that nobody bothers anymore. China simply doesn't play these stupid games. That's why they are cheap.
therockspush 6y ago
Link to the satellite view of the lake. https://www.google.com/maps/@40.6350939,109.6828376,5323m/data=!3m1!1e3!5m1!1e1?hl=en https://www.google.com/maps/@40.6350939,109.6828376,5323m/da... Link to the satellite view of the permanente mine outside cupertino. https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3198492,-122.103036,5187m/data=!3m1!1e3!5m1!1e1?hl=en https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3198492,-122.103036,5187m/da...
- antijava 6y ago
  What does the Permanente quarry have to do with tech exactly? It is a limestone quarry and has been since 1939.
  - therockspush 6y ago
    sounds like you know the area, good chance you have kaiser permanente healthcare. you can appreciate the scale of this lake if you know the permanente.
- 08-15 6y ago
  It's just 2km by 3km! This is tiny! It actually looks as if the Chinese are doing it right this time: the ugliness of the black sludge is confined to a small lake, so that the sludge can settle and the water can drain. One day, when the pond is filled with clay, they will turn it into a park.
Gravityloss 6y ago
Many mining sites look really desolate and alien. If you carve a hole into solid rock, the crushed rock doesn't fit into that same space anymore. You will have rubble piles. Also all kinds of substances start leaching from it. What was just inert rock is now mining waste. Basically you can easily poison nearby water bodies. And this isn't even talking about any kind of extraction, just the physical action. Why single out the smart phones?

222 points by soperj 6y ago

The question I think needs to be answered is how we can move the market forces to move away from such harmful practices? I think this is a symptom of much larger geopolitical and economic issues.

lambdasquirrel 6y ago
- Apple is using 100% recycled rare earths in their upcoming iPhones, but they are just one manufacturer out of many. - No one has really figured out how to extract the elements out of phones after they have been manufactured. - We don't yet know how to recycle solar panels either.
- tshoaib 6y ago
  100% only for the magnets, but it's still a great improvement
- nix23 6y ago
  >Apple is using 100% recycled rare earths in their upcoming iPhones Where is it recycled and how much more energy the recycling uses?
  - saurik 6y ago
    Rare earth metals are rare; it isn't an energy tradeoff as it isn't like we are synthesizing this stuff... it is a "eventually we run out" situation (and presumably a lot sooner than oil, with less ability to swap in replacements).
    - adventured 6y ago
      > Rare earth metals are rare; it isn't an energy tradeoff ... it is a "eventually we run out" situation Rare earth metals are mostly not rare. The vast majority of rare earths are plentiful. We're not going to run out of the most useful rare earths for hundreds of years at a minimum. It's the extraction and processing that is a problem (environmentally), not the scarcity factor. The US for example is loaded with rare earths and has barely even scratched the surface of its supply (the same is true of Canada and Australia); there has been a lack of interest in rare earth mining in the US for the past several decades because of how intense and dirty the process of extraction and processing is. > The rare earths are a relatively abundant group of 17 elements composed of scandium, yttrium, and the lanthanides. The elements range in crustal abundance from cerium, the 25th most abundant element of the 78 common elements in the Earth's crust at 60 parts per million, to thulium and lutetium, the least abundant rare-earth elements at about 0.5 part per million. https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/rare-earths-statistics-and-information https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/rare-earths-statistics-and... > The "rare" in the name of this group of elements is actually somewhat misleading; the U.S. Geological Survey describes them as "relatively abundant in the Earth's crust." https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dont-panic-about-rare-earth-elements/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dont-panic-about-... https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/rare-earth-elements-not-rare-just-playing-hard-to-get-38812856/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/rare-earth-ele...
    - nix23 6y ago
      >Rare earth metals are rare; No one said that...an exaclty because of that i am no shure if recycling is better or worse for the environment.
  - yazaddaruvala 6y ago
    Apple is also moving their energy to renewable sources for all of their facilities, their partners, and I believe their partners' partners. They are not just pushing renewable sources with the partners and partners' partners, but are also pushing for Carbon neutral. With that plan meant to hit "zero/negative footprint by 2030" I find myself feeling less and less guilty about buying their products and returning the "not yet old" versions. And in 2030, I'd be happy to pay Apple the incremental extra $ for the guilt free experience.
    - nix23 6y ago
      >And in 2030, I'd be happy to pay Apple the incremental extra $ for the guilt free experience. Gosh you really belief in that right?
      - yazaddaruvala 6y ago
        I mean, it is aspirational and 10 years away. So they could be wrong and not hit the goal. Beyond that, yes I buy iPhones anyways and so will trust Apple at their word until some new agency does a deep dive and provides the counterfactual data. Or if over 10 years, Apple erodes the trust they have built with me.
        nix23 6y ago
        Yeah maybe first let others fix your apple products so you dont have to buy a new one every 3 years...THAT would be the first step. BTW: stop trust a company...thats what religion is for...and if you live in a really good place the goverment...but NEVER a Company
      - lolsal 6y ago
        Given the other options, it's a vote with my wallet for the kind of world I want.
ianmobbs 6y ago
Through legislation. Market forces don’t care about the environment, just profitability. That’s where the government is supposed to come in...
- bilbo0s 6y ago
  I don't know man? Can't legislate physics. At some point, people are going to need to decide that they shouldn't use some of this stuff. Or maybe make the stuff last longer? Or figure out how to recycle it? Not sure. So many issues from refining through to product lifecycle. (The fact that solar panels cannot be recycled for instance really kills me personally. Like a dagger to my heart.) I don't know what the answer is, but it's clear we have a long way to go.
  - 542354234235 6y ago
    > Can't legislate physics. What does that even mean? You can absolutely legislate the cost to the environment, to health, to sustainability. If making a widget causes $1 trillion in environmental damage to natural resources, legislating that the company is responsible for that damage is the solution. They either innovate to prevent the damage in the first place, raise prices of the product to cover all the costs (which would basically price out products that aren't sustainable), or they go out of business and stop damaging the environment.
orthecreedence 6y ago
Stop using markets (or "prices") for allocation. Instead track resource/labor contents of products directly and "price" resources according to their pollution/known externalities. One of the biggest problems we have is that markets can price labor costs effectively, but are terrible at pricing resource/raw material costs. Supply and demand has nothing to do with ecology and known externalities of resources. We should be able to set the costs of fossil fuels directly democratically (and same with rare earth minerals) either on a per-resource basis (if the use of the resource has known costs) or a per-process basis (if the process of extracting the resource has known costs), and have those costs trickle through the economy via companies that are effectively acting in a distributed productive relationship (like a market) but without using prices for allocation. Instead use orders directly, and then have consumers cover the costs of products on purchase, at which point the money they earned from their (negotiated) wages would be destroyed and not circulate the productive economy. Markets can only effectively price resources in a democratic setting. This is impossible in a globalized capitalist system.

najarvg 6y ago

This is a duplicate of a much older HN post - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9317003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9317003 and the linked article is from 2015

notRobot 6y ago
It's not a duplicate if the previous discussion was more than a year ago.
- 0xffff2 6y ago
  It's allowed/encouraged to repost links from time to time, but it's still a duplicate.
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    The distinction isn't very useful. This is a forum. I can't even respond to that page of comments. The only thing noteworthy about that HN link is that some interesting comments may have been posted there.
    - andai 6y ago
      Often the original submission will have more comments, and by proportion more of the top comments will be interesting or insightful.
adwww 6y ago
Ah, that explains the 'Share on Google+' button I saw then!

speeder 6y ago

The article mentions the pollution there is in part for the construction of "Green" tech, like wind turbines and batteries for solar panels. Are there serious research about how much this "green" tech is actually greener or not? And what are the actually greenest energy we can have right now?

zdw 6y ago
There's a ratio of "how much energy can be stored by a device" vs "how much energy did it take to create" graph halfway down this page: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/05/ditch-the-batteries-off-the-grid-compressed-air-energy-storage.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/05/ditch-the-batteries-... TL;DR: Lithium ion batteries have a ratio of around 10:1, whereas compressed air or pumped water are 200:1 or better. This is just storage - I'd be interested in the ratio on solar photovoltaic, wind, or similar power generation tech.
- StillBored 6y ago
  BTW: Surely for compressed air systems that are pumping into a high pressure container it would be possible to use a vacuum bottle design and solve the heat loss+add problem.
  - jbay808 6y ago
    Along these lines, MIT Prof. Alex Slocum's proposal was to build concrete domes underwater, and evacuate them to store energy / re-fill them to release energy. The pressure difference is the difference between vacuum and hundreds of atmospheres, and there are no compressible working fluids to cause adiabatic heating losses. https://newatlas.com/mit-offshore-wind-concrete-sphere-energy-storage/27357/ https://newatlas.com/mit-offshore-wind-concrete-sphere-energ... (Edit: better link)
- leafmeal 6y ago
  I was sceptical of this at first. I suspected that the "how much energy can be stored" was only in regards to a single use, but I checked out the source, and this is over the lifetime of the storage medium. It blows my mind that it takes 1/10 of the energy it will ever store to manufacture a lithium ion battery.

lokl 6y ago

Who is investing in R&D of less toxic methods of refining rare earths?

KiranRao0 6y ago
I don't know anyone specific, but I've heard about astroid mining as an alternative to mining rare earth metals.
- nix23 6y ago
  >but I've heard about astroid mining as an alternative to mining rare earth metals Good idea, and lets go to mars so we dont have to care about earth ;)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
pas 6y ago
The problem is not hard, I'd even wager to say it's solved. Simply use a lot more filters, basically build big wastewater treatment plants (covered sedimentation tanks, [reverse]osmosis filters, last resort, use closed loops and fractionating columns [like the distillation towers at refineries]), it just takes a lot more energy. Similarly we can make carbon-neutral concrete and steel, it just takes a lot lot lot more energy. And we kind of dropped the ball on energy because of costs. So now we are in a two or more front war for more and clean energy.

FearNotDaniel 6y ago

An interesting point of anecdata is that I didn't choose to upgrade my perfectly good three-year-old smartphone. I was forced to do so by the weight of compulsory upgrades to OS and apps that now make what was once a decent enough product completely unusable. I'm sure the hardware would last several more years if the vendors would allow me to run the same software that was originally installed on it.

geodel 6y ago
> weight of compulsory upgrades to OS and apps that now make what was once a decent enough product completely unusable. Software developers and companies alike are very proud of it. I can understand companies defending it due to commercial concerns. But developers defending addition of enormous number of dependencies, bloating the software and calling it best practice to reuse existing components saddens me.
hombre_fatal 6y ago
If there is any individual guilt here, I don't think that would free you from it. Though I'm not very convinced of the individual guilt angle. It's a systemic problem of incentives (lack of good ones).
- forinti 6y ago
  Look at the countries that were labeled Sustainable Economies in recent years (Cuba and Ecuador). Is there a way to convince people in rich countries to live with the same level of consumption as these countries do? Can you even convince these countries to stay as they are?
  - 542354234235 6y ago
    > Cuba An island nation that the most powerful country in the world has been trying to cripple economically for half a century. > Ecuador A country with a smaller GDP than that majority of US states. These are probably not good or representative examples of how this would work writ large.
- 6y ago

dade_ 6y ago

Looks like mining to me. While it reminds me of the tailing ponds from the tar sands in Fort McMurray, a real Hell on Earth was Vale SA's tailings dam collapse in Brumadinho that devastated the downstream villages of Bento Rodrigues and Paracatu de Baixo.

Jerry2 6y ago

If you think that "green tech" is "green" or that it somehow eliminates fossil fuels out of the equation, please watch Jeff Gibbs' "Planet of the Humans" documentary. It will open your eyes to how this "green tech" movement really works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q2m_mCIrQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q2m_mCIrQY

aspenmayer 6y ago
Here's the actual creator's YT page and full doc. That link is to some other person's page, who doesn't appear involved in the production. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE
yboris 6y ago
Thank you for sharing! Amazing!
ardy42 6y ago
At 36:50 there's a quite interesting segment that's basically I, Pencil [1] with the moral inverted: https://youtu.be/_Q2m_mCIrQY?t=2210 https://youtu.be/_Q2m_mCIrQY?t=2210 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Pencil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Pencil. I read the original for the first time recently, and was amused that it ended with a rant against the post office.
sacred_numbers 6y ago
Before anyone takes this documentary seriously, please do some research. This[1] Wikipedia article is a good starting point, but there are a lot of sources showing how misleading and inaccurate this documentary is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Humans#Factual_accuracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Humans#Factual_a...
- Jerry2 6y ago
  Before anyone takes above comment seriously, do some investigation of your own. That article is nothing more than a damage control and is completely funded by the "green tech" billionaires. Just look at the history log. If you want to see how far these """green""" tech billionaires have gone to censor and suppress this documentary and what kinds of legal tricks and other pressure they've used, read Max Blumenthal's article. >‘Green’ billionaires behind professional activist network that led suppression of ‘Planet of the Humans’ documentary https://thegrayzone.com/2020/09/07/green-billionaires-planet-of-the-humans/ https://thegrayzone.com/2020/09/07/green-billionaires-planet... Michael Moore also interviewed Max about this amazing investigation into how these rich people censor things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDIEqHGAveA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDIEqHGAveA

carapace 6y ago

I'm a recluse, I don't go anywhere or talk to anyone anyway, so when I lost my smart phone a few years ago I didn't bother to replace it. I think if I still had one this would convince me to get rid of it.

PeterStuer 6y ago

No sorry, it is not 'created by our thirst for tech'. It is cratered by our socioeconomic system that selects for concentrated benefits and externality dumping, no matter what the cost.

davidw 6y ago

A number of years ago, people speculated that as people in China became wealthier, they'd start worrying about things beyond just having food and some nicer goods in their lives, and start pushing for change, including, perhaps, some form of democracy. Things like local environmental disasters could have moved things in that direction, as people tire of the corruption and lack of action. That hasn't happened, sadly.

elevenoh 6y ago
Wonder if this (Chinese citizen push for democracy, individual liberties, care for the environment etc.) will come to unfold as a kind of 'dam break' wave of rapid change over a slow-moving change where nodes of conformity are squashed by the collective. Memes spread pretty quick these days.
wahern 6y ago
> That hasn't happened, sadly. Why do you say that? From the news I've read over the past 10-20 years, my understanding is that China has steadily increased its emphasis on environmental protection and regulation, for example regarding food safety, air quality, and even nuclear safety (nuclear plants are becoming more expensive to build there, though claims of the industry's death have been extremely premature). Most recently, for example, part of the reason for banning imports of recyclables is because they were piling up and contributing to pollution. It's just that in absolute terms, and relative to the standards of rich industrial countries, China has a lot more ground to still cover. As with domestic news, the fact that you read and hear about these situations is often better understood as evidence that things are getting better, not worse, reflecting a positive shift in attention and emphasis. Especially in a country like China where authorities have far more control over both domestic and foreign reporting--compare the difficulty of substantive reporting on the Ugyhurs.

colechristensen 6y ago

I’m sorry but this just fetishizes environmental disaster. Some reporter is surprised that mining produces waste and writes about it like one small lake is poisoning the planet. Yes it could probably be done better with better environmental standards but waste is waste and setting aside small areas of the planet for it isn’t equivalent to some global catastrophe. So many people seem to be living in this bubble where the only thing they experience is the clean interfaces to civilization and then they talk about the messy bits like the slightest blemish is doom. A dispassionate analysis of the site might have painted a more convincing argument for something being wrong, but as it is, it reads like a melodramatic fainting after seeing some trash. There are plenty of very real environmental issues, but if you sensationalize everything that isn’t pristine natural beauty, it doesn’t matter because your motivations have moved from reason to superstition.

hinkley 6y ago
When water was a source of power and transport, we made a habit of building industry right on bodies of water. When we switched to other ways to transport goods and power, we never stopped that tradition and I wonder how harshly future generations are going to judge us for doing so. We aren't using the river, but the river is still the same form of transportation it ever was. We don't barge away the goods, but the river will still happily carry any toxic materials that leave the factory by malice, incompetence, human error, or a series of unfortunate events (Fukushima). I mean at this point, building a factory where you swear not to pollute next to a geographical feature that makes it easy to pollute without getting caught or where any honest mistake is magnified... it feels like a teenager hovering by the display of expensive stuff and saying they are just looking, or playing catch in the living room. You won't be the least surprised when you find out there is something missing/broken. The solution isn't more yelling, it's taking away the temptation to misbehave, and/or reducing the consequences of doing so. We need public policy to build a proverbial glass cabinet around our core watersheds. Build highways, train and powerlines and zone for factories at a slight separation, along on the route between Here and There, where nothing we care about is directly downwind or downhill. Tennessee Valley Authority lost a dam and dumped years of fly ash into a tributary of the Mississippi. It's just a matter of time until deferred maintenance takes out this dam, and the lake remembers it was a river once.

quantified 6y ago

5.5 year old article. Please note with a `(2015)` in the title. I don't imagine it's any better today.

soperj 6y ago

I am still using my galaxy s3. I've got a few broken galaxy s3s that I've harvested for parts when something has gone wrong with my current s3.

anderspitman 6y ago
I have an old broken one I'd be happy to mail to you. Contact info in my profile.
- soperj 6y ago
  thanks man! I'm good at the moment (i have 3 to scrounge parts from), but I do appreciate it. Also your contact info is not actually in your profile currently.
  - anderspitman 6y ago
    Sorry should have been more clear. You can contact me through my website, which is in my profile.

barney54 6y ago

I hoped this was an update from the 2015 article, but this is the article from 2015. I’d like to know if there have been any improvements in China on this issue.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Khaine 6y ago

Its predominantly China's fault. They achieved a monopoly on rare earth metals by undercutting competitors by ignoring safety and environmental practices. Rare earth metals are not rare. They are common, but processing them safely without environmental impact is not cheap. Whenever competitors show up, China floods the market to push down prices to bankrupt them. The world needs to start putting environmental and social tariffs on Chinese goods, to force them to improve environmental standards, and put a stop to human rights abuses.

im3w1l 6y ago
> Whenever competitors show up, China floods the market to push down prices to bankrupt them. Maybe governments should take the opportunity to stockpile at that moment. Either the price rises keeping the competitors afloat or you have a nice stockpile. Either way you become immune to shenanigans.
08-15 6y ago
No, it's the Unites States' fault. In 1982 (iirc), the US decided that Thorium is a "source material" for nuclear weapons, even though it very clearly isn't. Since rare earth metals have chemistry very similar to Thorium, they tend to occur together. Anyone who mines REE, ends up with waste Thorium. It's just slightly radioactive, chemically inert sand, but by decree it is a "TENORM" (technically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive material), and by decree, someone stealing it could theoretically build an atomic bomb from it, even though they can't in the real world. So because it's a TENORM, the waste can't go back into the same hole in the ground that it came from. And because it's a "source material", it has to be guarded. And the eventual disposal has to follow all sorts of regulations. All of that is so expensive, that nobody bothers anymore. China simply doesn't play these stupid games. That's why they are cheap.

therockspush 6y ago

Link to the satellite view of the lake. https://www.google.com/maps/@40.6350939,109.6828376,5323m/data=!3m1!1e3!5m1!1e1?hl=en https://www.google.com/maps/@40.6350939,109.6828376,5323m/da... Link to the satellite view of the permanente mine outside cupertino. https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3198492,-122.103036,5187m/data=!3m1!1e3!5m1!1e1?hl=en https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3198492,-122.103036,5187m/da...

antijava 6y ago
What does the Permanente quarry have to do with tech exactly? It is a limestone quarry and has been since 1939.
- therockspush 6y ago
  sounds like you know the area, good chance you have kaiser permanente healthcare. you can appreciate the scale of this lake if you know the permanente.
08-15 6y ago
It's just 2km by 3km! This is tiny! It actually looks as if the Chinese are doing it right this time: the ugliness of the black sludge is confined to a small lake, so that the sludge can settle and the water can drain. One day, when the pond is filled with clay, they will turn it into a park.

Gravityloss 6y ago

Many mining sites look really desolate and alien. If you carve a hole into solid rock, the crushed rock doesn't fit into that same space anymore. You will have rubble piles. Also all kinds of substances start leaching from it. What was just inert rock is now mining waste. Basically you can easily poison nearby water bodies. And this isn't even talking about any kind of extraction, just the physical action. Why single out the smart phones?