Past The Suburbs Of The Chinese City Of Baotou Below A Quadruple Carriageway A Lonely Path Led Me To An Embankment Bristling With Pylons Each With A Security Camera Watching For Intruders

Past the suburbs of the Chinese city of Baotou, below a quadruple carriageway, a lonely path led me to an embankment bristling with pylons, each with a security camera watching for intruders.
This is how I reached the Weikuang Dam - an artificial lake into which metallic intestines regurgitate torrents of black water from the nearby refineries.

I was looking at ten square kilometres of toxic effluent. After observing this immense, disintegrating landscape, my guide and I decided to move before the security cameras alerted the police to our presence.
A few minutes later, we arrived in a village called Dalahai on another side of the artificial lake.

Here, the thousands of inhabitants breathe in the toxic discharge of the reservoir as well as eating produce, such as corn and buckwheat, grown in it.
There are toxic secrets behind mobile phones used every day around the world 
Cancer affects the local population and many villagers have died.

The hair of young men barely aged 30 has suddenly turned white. Children grow up without developing any teeth.
One villager, a 54-year-old called Li Xinxia, confided in me despite knowing it's a dangerous subject. He said: ‘There are a lot of sick people here.
Cancer, strokes, Bulk Mail Server Hosting high blood pressure… almost all of us are affected. We are in a grave situation. They did some tests and our village was nicknamed "the cancer village". We know the air we breathe is toxic and that we don't have that much longer to live.'
The provincial authorities offered villagers compensation to relocate but these farming folk were reluctant to move to high-rise flats in a neighbouring town.
In short, it is a disaster area.
And the reason? Our insatiable demand for rare metals.
For centuries, mankind mined just seven primary metals - iron, gold, silver, copper, lead, aluminium and mercury.

But from the 1970s, attention turned to lesser-known rare metals found in terrestrial rocks in infinitesimal amounts which have superb magnetic, catalytic and optical properties.
Now, we are totally reliant on them for the manufacture of devices such as mobile phones, not to mention electric and/or hybrid cars which require twice as many rare metals as a traditional internal-combustion engine vehicle.
They are also a key component in wind turbines and solar panels.

Some of these substances have exotic names: vanadium, germanium, platinoids, tungsten, antimony, beryllium, fluorine, rhenium, tantalum, niobium, to name but a few.
For Bulk Mail Server Hosting eight years, I have researched these rare metals that are upending our world.
Across four continents, men and women involved in the opaque and underground industry told me a dark tale.
By their account, the development of these substances has not done us, or the planet, any of the favours we would have expected from a supposedly greener and friendlier world - far from it.
Above all, our dependence on rare metals brings two very big problems.

The first is that mining, refining and recycling them is immensely polluting, thereby giving the lie to the idea that our increasingly digital and electricity-powered life is greener than one reliant on fossil fuels.
<div class="art-ins mol-factbox floatRHS news" data-version="2" id="mol-2b8f8210-5dae-11eb-9ba7-cb4fc2ad2868" website secrets behind your mobile phone