Man, that's fascinating, full study here [1].

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.

1. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.4c12959

2. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.2020.128

Cheap and recycled cookware or cooking oil would be up there on the list of interesting things to check imho

- 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

Do wonder if it could be unintentionally being alloyed into recycled aluminium etc. Though I'm not sure if that's more likely than upstream routes.

Good old scientific mystery.

Nice that you pointed out that lithium is actually necessary for the human body and having a deficiency is related to decreased neuronal potency. Unfortunately one can’t get lithium supplements in the regular shop only with special prescription from the pharmacy here in Europe.

I entirely fail to see how a government related pollution problem is related to a potential EV charging breakthrough by a private company.

yeah, there are a crap ton of lithium based devices made in china... my biggest suspect for that is the vape market.

its already a blackmarket industry.. i bet they dont care much about where how the batteries are made.

What data do you base that on?

It's xenophobia. Whenever Chinese anything is brought up someone has to bring up something unrelated to show how horrible china is.

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.

I think holding China to a greater standard than USA shows respect rather than disrespect for China.

Given the current US administration I don't see any respect. America wants a shining beacon on their tech and offerings while my continent Europe and others has to be painted in a worse light.

Has nothing to do with it but the US is learning...

"Trump administration moves to dismantle EPA’s science office" - https://www.ehn.org/trump-administration-moves-to-dismantle-...

Where’s the evidence that the cause is “clean energy”?

It didn't appear from nowhere via by Monkey Magic, that much is certain.

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?

Improper disposal of used batteries (eg. burning them) is another potential exposure route.

I’m admittedly really out of the loop on battery tech developments but I was hopeful the industry was slowly steering towards iron/sodium batteries to replace lithium for reasons of cost and pollution. Did that hit a roadblock or is it just still very early stage?

China supposedly made a breakthrough in battery technology, what does that have to do with lithium pollution in China? You sound bitter about China’s progress.

We used to poison people with lead. Stopping lithium spreading seems like an easy task.

If China pays extra cost to deal with pollution, their ev won't be that cheap.

Half the authors on that paper are employed by the Chinese academy of sciences. Doesn't look like brushing it under the rug to me.

More than likely it'll turn out to be something that can be easily and relatively inexpensively mitigated.

Sadly, all reports on this paper have been removed from every media in China in a single night. Academics are only allowed to be discussed among academics.

It's true that I can't find any reporting on Baidu Xinwen. I can definitely understand why, as there's a real risk of causing potentially unjustified panic (scientific reporting and literacy isn't great globally). More research is needed before action.

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.

How is that related to this news? In Europe we have many potential lithium mines and in the US mines are currently being developed.