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China’s graphite mining communities pay heavy health toll, to supply modern technological devices

Inhaling particulate matter can cause an array of health troubles, according to health experts, including heart attacks and respiratory ailments.

But it’s not just the air. The graphite plant discharges pollutants into local waters…

IN YOUR PHONE, IN THEIR AIR  A trace of graphite is in consumer tech. In these Chinese villages, it’s everywhere.Washington Post, Story by Peter Whoriskey   Photos by Michael Robinson Chavez  Videos by Jorge Ribas   October 2, 2016 At night, the pollution around the village has an otherworldly, almost fairy-tale quality.

“The air sparkles,” said Zhang Tuling, a farmer in a village in far northeastern China. “When any bit of light hits the particles, they shine.”

By daylight, the particles are visible as a lustrous gray dust that settles on everything. It stunts the crops it blankets, begrimes laundry hung outside to dry and leaves grit on food. The village’s well water has become undrinkable, too.

Beside the family home is a plot that once grew saplings, but the trees died once the factory began operating, said Zhang’s husband, Yu Yuan.

“This is what we live with,” Zhang said, slowly waving an arm at the stumps.

Zhang and Yu live near a factory that produces graphite, a glittery substance that, while best known for filling pencils, has become an indispensable resource in the new millennium. It is an ingredient in lithium-ion batteries.

Smaller and more powerful than their predecessors, lithium batteries power smartphones and laptop computers and appear destined to become even more essential as companies make much larger ones to power electric cars.

The companies making those products promote the bright futuristic possibilities of the “clean” technology. But virtually all such batteries use graphite, and its cheap production in China, often under lax environmental controls, produces old-fashioned industrial pollution.

At five towns in two provinces of China, Washington Post journalists heard the same story from villagers living near graphite companies: sparkling night air, damaged crops, homes and belongings covered in soot, polluted drinking water — and government officials inclined to look the other way to benefit a major employer.

After leaving these Chinese mines and refiners, much of the graphite is sold to Samsung SDI, LG Chem and Panasonic — the three largest manufacturers of lithium-ion batteries. Those companies supply batteries to major consumer companies such as Samsung, LG, General Motors and Toyota.

Apple products use batteries made by those companies, too — specifically from Samsung SDI and LG Chem. But Fred Sainz, an Apple spokesman, said that for current products, the company has switched to synthetic graphite, which is not mined. The company declined to say when it made the change to rely exclusively on synthetic graphite.

Some provinces in China sought to crack down on the polluters, and three years ago they issued fines to several graphite companies.

But the pollution continues. Villagers said the cleanup efforts failed — they were short-lived or otherwise inadequate — because local authorities are closely allied with company officials and unwilling to acknowledge the gravity of the environmental trouble.

Complaints about the pollution are often met with intimidation. People living near graphite plants frequently appeared fearful of pressing their grievances.

“Here he comes,” whispered one older woman in Mashan, near the city of Jixi in northeastern China, turning her back and pointing furtively at a village official who was approaching. She and her husband had been talking to a reporter about long-standing graphite pollution in her neighborhood. While some talked freely, there were people in all of the five areas with graphite plants who, like this couple, were reluctant to speak on the record.

In addition, plant managers and party officials sometimes sternly discouraged journalists from speaking with villagers. At three of the villages, the taxi carrying Post journalists was followed.

Whatever the obstacles, the villagers who would talk offered remarkably consistent accounts of the pollution. The graphite, they typically said with disgust, makes everything mai tai, a regional expression meaning dirty.

Since the graphite factory opened in Zhang’s village about five years ago, the graphite has become more than a nuisance. The couple live near Jixi, a city less than 50 miles from the Russian border. The dust has covered their corn crop, so much so that walking by a row of cornstalks leaves their faces blackened. And it seems impossible to keep it out of the house — at the dinner table, it often leaves them chewing the particles in their teeth.

They worry, too, about the health consequences, especially of breathing it in. Inhaling particulate matter can cause an array of health troubles, according to health experts, including heart attacks and respiratory ailments.

But it’s not just the air. The graphite plant discharges pollutants into local waters, Zhang and Yu said — a nightly event that they can detect by smell: The discharges leave a chemical odor that irritates their noses and throats. Those emissions have not only made their water undrinkable, they said, but also kept the local river from freezing in winter. They also think the discharge poisoned the poplar trees they were growing for lumber outside their home, just beyond their coops for ducks and geese and chickens.

“All the trees were fine until the graphite plant started,” Yu said. “It killed my trees.”

“We want to move, but we don’t have any money,” Zhang said.

The couple said they and others have complained to the local government but were told the graphite company is too big and beyond their power to contain. The company, they said, refused to meet with them and others in the affected area.

“Of course I would move if I had money!” Yu added, a trace of anger straining his face. “Who would want to live in this mai tai place? Here the dust is everywhere.”

THE SUPPLY CHAIN

In response to questions, some of the major electronics and car companies that sell products that rely on lithium-ion batteries said they were investigating the problems identified by Post reporting.

“We are currently investigating your concerns, so at this time we do not have detailed information,” said Yongdoo Shin, a spokesman for battery maker Samsung SDI……….

Whether consumer companies are adhering to their environmental bona fides, however, is difficult to know, especially if the supply chain leads back to China.

One obstacle is the complexity of supply chains and the secrecy that surrounds them.

Tracing the origins of the graphite in a phone, for example, requires finding out where the ­phonemaker obtains batteries, where the battery makers acquire the portion of batteries known as anodes, and where the anode producers get their graphite. Moreover, because there are multiple suppliers at each step and various types of graphite, it is difficult to know where any given batch of the mineral ends up.

Several companies declined to disclose the origin of their graphite. For example, Tesla, perhaps the best-known electric-car maker, uses Panasonic batteries. Tesla said those batteries have never included graphite from the Chinese company BTR, but it declined to identify its graphite source.

The other obstacle is that the people most knowledgeable about the sources of pollution, those who live near the factories, are often unwilling to complain publicly, especially in China.

To link the graphite in popular U.S. products back to factories in China, The Post used public records, company announcements and reports from industry analysts, as well as interviews with company officials at the Chinese International Battery Fair, a trade show in Shenzhen.

Occupying a central position in the graphite supply chain is BTR, the world’s largest supplier of natural graphite material for lithium-ion batteries, according to industry analysts. (Artificial or synthetic graphite is used in some lithium-ion batteries, but natural graphite, which is mined, is used predominantly. Natural graphite costs roughly half as much.)

In an interview with The Post, Chen Bifeng, a marketing director for BTR, said the company serves about 75 percent of the market demand for natural graphite materials for batteries.

“Like everyone else, we sell some to BTR,” said Chen Geng, assistant to the president of Aoyu Graphite Group, which processes graphite at several locations in China. “They’re big.”

From BTR, the graphite is distributed around the world. The company sells graphite directly to the largest manufacturers of lithium-ion batteries, including Samsung SDI, LG Chem and Panasonic, according to Chen Bifeng, the BTR marketing director.

Those companies, in turn, make batteries for Samsung, LG, GM, Toyota and other consumer companies.

The Post sent letters to consumer companies whose battery suppliers have been supplied by BTR. The letters sought information on connections between the consumer companies and the natural graphite produced by Chinese firms blamed for pollution.

GM said a BTR subsidiary had been supplying graphite but declined to give further details. In a statement, the company said it “is committed to transforming the industry by reducing the environmental impact of our vehicles and manufacturing them in the most sustainable manner possible.”…….

The graphite companies visited by The Post also supply other intermediate companies — not just BTR — and their graphite products are used in lithium-ion batteries around the globe. The graphite from those factories reaches some large Japanese companies, such as Nippon Carbon, as well as a Chinese company known as Shanshan that makes battery anodes.

The Post was unable to follow the graphite much further beyond those intermediate companies. Mitsubishi Chemical, Hitachi Chemical and Nippon Carbon did not respond to repeated requests for information about their customers. Shanshan officials hung up on a reporter.

CITY OF GRAPHITE’

Graphite is found around the world, but Heilongjiang province, a relatively remote locale on the Russian border, is the largest single source. For many there, it means big business.

At the entrance of Mashan, a small, dusty village near Jixi in Heilongjiang, four immense billboards celebrate the graphite industry.

Amid a jumble of storefronts, mopeds and pedestrians, the billboards depict samples of the gray powder against a backdrop of blue skies and daisies.

This, the sign says, is the “City of Graphite.”

China’s dominance in the graphite industry is in part because of price. While the mineral can be found elsewhere, the low cost of Chinese graphite discourages companies elsewhere from opening mines. The price of raw graphite suitable for refinement into anodes is about $550 per ton.

Stephen A. Riddle, president of U.S.-based Asbury Carbons, which began importing graphite from China in the 1970s, said the reason China was able to capture the largest share of the graphite market is mainly a matter of “price, purity and quantity.”

Chinese companies, Riddle said, benefited from a combination of low labor costs and determined ingenuity.

At one mine he visited in the early 1980s, for example, workers used picks and shovels to retrieve the raw material from the dirt — unlike the tractors and other heavy equipment used elsewhere — and then processed the graphite using handmade equipment.

“They were obviously a very low-cost operation,” Riddle said.

In the ’70s, China produced about a tenth of the world’s supply. By 2015, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, it was producing about two-thirds of the world’s supply.

The growth of the industry, particularly around Jixi, has had environmental consequences, especially in recent years.

Up a hill not far from the rice paddy worked by the villagers of Liumao stands a graphite mine and processing plant owned by BTR.

Several residents complained of the pollution, which they blamed for tainted water and dusty air.

“If you leave the window open, the graphite gets everywhere — on the furniture, on the plates,” Li Jie, 51, said as she cleaned some planters for rice seedlings. “It builds up on the windowsills. The dust covers the cherries we grow.”

Zhao Guiyan, 63, also of Liumao, covers her nose when passing by some local waters, because of the chemical smell. “I’m worried what it’s doing to our health — breathing it in and eating it,” she said. Like many in the village, she relies in part on food grown in her yard or her neighbors’.

“I wash the vegetables over and over again,” Zhao said. “But [the graphite] is still there. It tastes and feels like you are chewing sand.”

In Mashan, residents reported similar problems. Mashan boasts several graphite plants, including another owned by BTR and one by Aoyu.

Lyu Shengwen, 55, a laborer, and his son share a two-bedroom home with a bathroom outside. They’ve been living in Mashan about 20 years, and around 2010 they noticed a rise in dust from nearby graphite plants.

“The dust . . . it’s everywhere,” Lyu said, grimacing.

He marched to a windowsill, swept his hand across it and then turned his blackened fingers toward visitors.

He shrugged and then headed outside toward a clothesline, from which he pulled a drying pair of pants and shook them. A cloud of dust appeared. Then, retrieving a black hose that supplies well water, he invited his guests to examine the water. It was cloudy and, he said, undrinkable — so oily that they now retrieve drinking water from a source more than a mile away.

“They mine anywhere on the mountain that they want to,” Lyu said of the graphite companies. “The plants release their discharge into the water. And it’s impossible to do anything about it.”…………Story by Peter Whoriskey. Photos by Michael Robinson Chavez. Videos by Jorge Ribas. Graphics by Lazaro Gamio andTim Meko. Design by Matt Callahan, Emily Chow and Chris Rukan.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/batteries/graphite-mining-pollution-in-china/

October 5, 2016 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | China, environment, health, Reference