Word: plasticizers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...After Thailand's currency collapsed in 1997, the government directed its tourism officials to market the country as a hot destination for plastic surgery, hoping to boost revenues. Thailand quickly became the go-to country for comparatively inexpensive sex-change operations, where patients faced fees as low as $5,000, as well as looser requirements for pre-surgery psychological counseling. Thailand is now a destination spot for all types of plastic surgery as well as a host of routine medical procedures. Bumrungrad International Hospital in Bangkok is probably Thailand's best-known mecca for medical tourists, boasting patients from "over...
...other side of the country, and must find his way back with the help of some new friends. As it turns out, some of the show’s biggest fans are hamsters. One delusional hamster in particular, a toothy fellow named Rhino (Mark Walton), lives inside a plastic ball in an RV park. There he meets Bolt and Bolt’s prisoner-cum-friend Mittens, a stray cat. Rhino saves the day and the movie. “Fully awesome!”—the rotund rodent’s favorite phrase—is probably...
...industrial boom over the past two decades, the global economic slowdown has left the scrappers struggling as prices for raw materials plummet. A group of men from Henan sit at a table playing a card game called "Fight the Landlord." They're the owners of a huge mound of plastic bottles they could process, but if they sold them now, they would lose money - scrap prices have fallen to levels not seen in years. "You want to know why our prices are dropping?" says Zhang Zhongming, 43, who moved to the village 20 years ago from Henan. "It's because...
...struggling to live by farming one-third of an acre. "In the past, nobody would do this work," he says. "It's for the outsiders, poor people from the countryside where they can't earn enough to eat meat even." Now the specter of deprivation is emerging again. Plastic bottles, which sold for $1,175 to $1,300 a ton as recently as the summer, are now trading in the $300-to-$450-a-ton range. Zhang claims that as a result of the downturn in scrap prices, the losses sustained by some of his neighbors have ranged from...
...Nearby, a man repairs a machine that shreds plastic bottles into nickel-size shards. Like most residents of the village, he migrated here from the countryside in the early '90s. "We came to work, because it's better than Henan," he says. Now he isn't so sure, but he knows that things won't be any better if he returns. The machine, now fixed, roars to life. "What to do?" he wonders with a shrug as he begins feeding old bottles into the machine. Back to work, that's his answer. The scrappers of Dongxiaokou can only hope...