I recently learned about the bizarre idea of "backyard furnaces". Around 1958, Mao Zedong decided the way to modernize was for every neighborhood to build numerous small blast furnaces and manufacture iron. These hundreds of thousands of furnaces needed constant fuel, leading to massive deforestation. Most of the iron was low quality or unusable, so the backyard furnaces were abandoned after a few years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60_Q-kAZbXA