This is why Ireland needs to stop forcing parents to buy their children laptops for school

There’s a photo taken by an AFP photographer that’s been circling the internet for a decade. It shows a woman standing on the bank of a 12sq km toxic reservoir in Inner Mongolia. It’s a vast, black, viscous lake of chemical and radioactive sludge generated by rare-earth-minerals processing. The lake is the Weikuang Dam on the outskirts of Baotou, a city of about two million people in northern China, which has long called itself the world capital of rare-earths production. It’s been accumulating this waste from processing neodymium, a rare-earth element in laptops, along with sulphuric acid, heavy metals and…