But all those phones have to be produced out of raw materials, some of which you’ve probably never even heard of, but which are already in short supply. Take the ever-more ubiquitous smartphone as an example. Lots of people, us included, don’t leave home without one of them, and it’s not inaccurate to say there is a large sector of society that regard them as indispensable. No need to memorise, just Google it.
Just using one popular model as an example, as of March 2014, around half a billion had been produced and sold worldwide. Include all smartphones, and the number increases to more than 1.4 billion in use, a number that grew by 44 per cent in 2013, with many more poised to be manufactured over the coming years. Mind you, there were no smartphones before 2007, so we’re still in the early days. Even so, the world is starting to feel the impact, although all you feel immediately is a bit of pleasure as you heft that sleek new phone in your hand, and as you stroke from app to app on that wonderfully responsive touchscreen.
What you’re actually stroking is rare earths. Producing that touchscreen requires somebody, somewhere, digging in a mine to extract minerals that will ultimately yield elements like yttrium, lanthanum, praseodymium, europium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, cerium and neodymium. Rare-earth elements are not exactly rare, but are so named because there are few economically viable ore deposits that yield them, and they are found in only a few countries. For that reason, among others, world production of rare earths has shifted from country to country over the years, as one area gets mined out or as political and economic winds shift. India and Brazil used to be leading producers sixty years ago. Then the Mountain Pass mine in California took over as the top dog in the 1960s and 1980s. Today it’s mostly all about China, which produces over 90 per cent of the rare earths necessary for manufacturing not only mobile phones, but also critical components in the motors and batteries for electric and hybrid cars, windmill turbines, and a variety of other things that are becoming increasingly important to society.
Which brings us back to tipping points, in two guises. The most obvious one is that any time a single country holds a monopoly on a needed commodity, problems can arise. In 2011, China produced a whopping 97 per cent of the rare-earth elements needed by the world. That has fallen to about 80 per cent since then, as mines in other countries came on line, but much of the ore from those mines ends up passing through China for processing anyway. This single-country bottleneck means we only have to look a couple of years down the road to see trouble. In 2010, world demand for rare-earth elements was about 136,100 tons, but global production was only 133,600 tons (remember, almost all from China). The 2,500-ton shortfall was covered by stocks already on hand from previous mining. By 2015, global demand is estimated to reach between 160,000 and 210,000 tons per year. Over the same time, China estimated that its internal demand would require 130,000 tons per year, which led to it restricting its exports, beginning in 2010. That caused some upheaval – it drove up prices for rare earths, meaning that United States and European manufacturers were forced to pay three times as much as their Chinese competitors, causing a dispute that landed at the World Trade Organization.
The outcome of that dispute aside (China lost, but as of 2014 was appealing), one simple fact remains. Within just the next two years, without a major recycling campaign, a lot more mines are going to have to be opened up to cover the anticipated shortfall of at least thirty thousand tons. While most experts agree that the reserves in the ground will probably meet demand for the next decade or two – it’s uncertain after that – bringing a new mine on line and getting its products into the supply chain takes five to ten years, meaning that at least temporary shortfalls are already on the horizon. The political and economic ramifications include things like price spikes and trade wars. In the best case, you can think of such marked and political fluctuations as very rapid changes in global dynamics that are potentially reversible, much like the boiling-water-to-steam kind of tipping point described in Chapter 1. For instance, with rare earths, five to ten years down the road, prices and availability could stabilise for a while if more mines are able to be brought on line, but in the interim, a period of volatility could make for some rough going for society. In the worst case, control of a needed resource by a single country makes for a new world order – a tipping point that is essentially irreversible over human lifetimes.
Ramping up rare-earth production also brings us to a second kind of tipping point – adding all those new mines means that we inevitably destroy what was there beforehand, and often make the surrounding areas unfit places to live. One of the most infamous mines-gone-bad examples is China’s Ba0tou district in the Gobi Desert of Inner Mongolia. Satellite images of the area bring to mind gigantic blobs of decaying grey-brown intestines splayed around waterways, and populated areas and waterways that show up as blood-red spatters and rivulets. (These remarkable NASA Earth Observatory Images can be viewed at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=77723.) The intestine-blobs are open-pit mines, the largest of which are more than half a mile deep (a thousand metres) and cover more than eighteen square miles (forty-eight square kilometres). Some of the blood-red rivulets drain into and out of black-coloured ponds that hold the waste water and muck from the mines. The water isn’t actually black (or blood-red) – that’s just the satellite-image colour enhancement. The real water is in fact much more colourful – oranges, yellows, browns and greys – a Technicolor swirl that is typical of soups of toxic waste.
On the ground, the situation is every bit as bad as the satellite images suggest, according to reporters who have visited and interviewed residents. You can get an idea of the scale of the problem when you realise that processing one ton of rare earths yields about two thousand tons of toxic waste. As a result, in the Baotou area, newspaper accounts say that the well water, which people drank before they knew any better, ‘looked fine, but it smelled really bad’, as related by a local farmer, Wang Jianguo, in a Guardian news story by Jonathan Kaiman (‘Rare Earth Mining in China: The Bleak Social and Environmental Costs’, 20 March 2014). The reason for the bad smell was that the water was laced with carcinogens and other toxic substances. The article that reported Wang’s words went on to say: ‘In the 1990s, when China’s rare earths production kicked into full gear, [Wang’s] sheep died and his cabbage crops withered. Most of his neighbours have moved away. Seven have died of cancer. His teeth have grown yellow and crooked; they jut out at strange angles from blackened gums.’ Some local sheep (those that survive) grow ‘two rows of teeth, some so long that they couldn’t close their mouths’.
Those kinds of examples are not confined to China by any means, nor are they confined to rare-earth mines – in the United States, for instance, just head west on Interstate 90 from Butte, Montana, towards Anaconda. In Butte you’ll see the Berkeley Pit, the mile-long, half-mile-wide, third-of-a-mile-deep remnant of an open-pit copper mine. The Pit is now partially filled by a lake, which is actually a potent broth of arsenic, cadmium, zinc, copper and sulphuric acid. Keep driving west out of Butte and you’ll begin to see stunted trees, then none at all, the result of soil contamination from noxious fumes and dangerous particulates that used to belch out of the copper smelters at Anaconda. Copper has not been mined in Butte or smelted at Anaconda for decades, yet a huge landscape, and its ability to support people and animals, and grow plants, has been changed forever.
We’ll talk more about the tipping points triggered by environmental devastation in Chapter 7, but the key point here is simply this: keeping all those mobile phones rolling off the assembly lines, as we’ve done up to now, is taking an ever-growing toll on Planet Earth. The copper in your smartphone probably comes from Chile, the gold from Peru, the silver from Australia, and the platinum from South Africa. It could also have coltan from Africa. Each of those places, and many more, now has its own versions of Baotou or Butte, and the number of those tipped-to-devastation landscapes is growing by the day.
Mining the raw materials that go into the stuff we like is just the first part of the impact story. The next part is turning the raw materials into the final product and getting it to your doorstep. That takes, in a word, energy, in the