[0]: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3301053/unus...
I wonder how the Lithium is entering the food chain? Given they've tested drinking water, food, and air.
Dust from processing? occupational exposure? unscrupulous recycling operations? but Lithium isn't a heavy metal so exposure would have to be ongoing.
Definitely need to test some additional cities and try and understand what's going on here. While concerning these blood levels are at 3% of the doses typically studied in psychiatric conditions. There's some potential public health benefits to low level lithium exposure actually [2] but at the same time you don't want to be unintentionally exposing pregnant folks.
- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cml2kr9wkdzo
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutter_oil
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-024-00686-7
Anywhere in the supply chain to a streetfood stall, or mom and pop restaurant or cornershop/bodega equivalent could have substitutions made that other people in the chain may not notice
Good old scientific mystery.
its already a blackmarket industry.. i bet they dont care much about where how the batteries are made.
Same thing happens with pollution per capita or any number of environmental metrics. People jump through insane mental hoops to paint China as far worse than the USA.
"Trump administration moves to dismantle EPA’s science office" - https://www.ehn.org/trump-administration-moves-to-dismantle-...
The source, then, is either
* raw lithium rich brines,
* Spodumene ore,
* waste from brine processing, OR waste from spodumene processing, (to create industrial scale supplies of industry usable lithium)
* waste from using lithium in industry to create (say) batteries.
Working through that list, lithium rich brines are largely in Chile and in some parts of China that are not Beijing, spodumene ore comes largely from Australia and parts of China that are not Beijing.
I'm not aware of, but this doesn't rule it out, brine or spodumene processing in the immediate vicinity of Beijing (it's quite likely there is some spodumene processing in that area) .. there definitely is large scale industry use of end product lithium in Beijing specifically to produce batteries.
The majority of lithium usage is related to "clean energy" .. or even just common battery use for electronics, so it's easily the most probable source of lithium turning up in an urban area such as Beijing.
Addendum: As grumpy-de-sre correctly points out below, the end of use disposal of lithium batteries in Beijing also deserves attention as a source.
The exact 'how' is as yet unknown .. it'll likely be tracked down and dealt with given the papers being published.
This will be of great interest to Texas a decade or so from now, the critical materials act and other recent activities have seen ground broken on lithium and rare earth concentrate processing plants on US soil in Texas (and elsewhere), the recent relaxing of EPA guidelines and reduction in oversight will likely lead to similar health issues appearing in due course.
Do you have any suggestions for where else it might come from?
More than likely it'll turn out to be something that can be easily and relatively inexpensively mitigated.
Fascinating that it's not a complete information blackout, but just disseminated on a need to know basis. It's kind of an interesting social contract really.