Rare earths mining and processing is difficult, expensive and rarely ecologically friendly. It produces enormous quantities of wastewater, requires vast amounts of energy, uses toxic materials in the refining process and can produce radioactive materials with half-lives of hundreds of years. The United States closed its rare earths mining operations in California’s Mojave Desert in the 1990s because of the environmental cost.
In the 1980s, Mitsubishi Chemical established a plant in an area called Bukit Merah west of Ipoh. For the last two decades, both Mitsubishi and Malaysia have paid the price in terms of deaths of workers from leukemia, and environmental cleanup that so far has cost US$99.2 million and still hasn’t been completed.Click here to read more