Plastic recycling in Hunan province. All the plastic recycling from the West used to get bought by China. What they were doing with it, was sending it to Hunan province, where small scale plastic recycling would basically spring up in people's kitchens. You can imagine a big pot of toxic chemicals and people throwing plastic in in some medieval act to get out fresh plastic. The tailings would be sent into nearby waterways like the rest of their water waste.

For years this went on and no one really knew about it. People started mysteriously dying, and then younger people started mysteriously dying the same way: people in their 70s, then people in their 60s, etc, down to the 30s and 40s. Eventually an investigating doctor figured out they were dying from strokes, due to exposure to these plasticizers that were getting into their water table. The government covered it up for a while.

This is an instance of some Chinese, in a system without institutional oversight or accountability, seeing a money-making opportunity, got themselves into trouble.

An iphone plant that needs a source of iron. A tire plant that needs industrial lubricants. There's a point in the distribution of the supply chain where work and products move from the international corporations to domestic suppliers. The oversight of those suppliers is often lacking - it's nonexistent, they buy off regulators, they forge certifications. Apple can't inspect every upstream supplier from pig to sausage, because material production touches too many aspects of their society.

But let's say Apple's really good and they check every box and verify every supplier. Apple's been in China a number of years...Xiaomi springs up to offer competitor phones. Xiaomi is a domestic producer. They need all the same chips, all the same boards, all the same screens. But maybe they don't go through the exhaustive verification process of their supply chain, and the cycle continues.

The Apple/Xiaomi example is fictitious, but it is just an example of how these things get out of hand. There are effort to introduce corporate accountability for this stuff, and it's getting better. But it's always going to be a problem.

Now, that's not to say we're faultless in all this. It's a profound issue. If you want an example that will keep you up at night, look up the open-air e-waste dumps in Ghana.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pr1zQrXM_7s

But there are intermediary points in development that are hard to get right, even with the best intentions, and in a society where corruption is the norm, and cultural understanding of environmental costs is low, there will always be ways it goes sideways.