Word: toxicants
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...craft lavished on these small things almost surpasses belief. So, often, does their sculptural quality: witness Issan's tiny, writhing red dragon netsuke. To complete his inro bearing the motif of a Chinese ship, Ritsuo (1663-1747) had to apply some 80 coats of lacquer-the dangerously toxic sap from a Japanese relative of poison ivy. Lacquer is slow drying; it had to be left for days or even weeks between coats, and laboriously burnished with charcoal and powdered deer horn. To examine these objects is to realize how vast a language of craft has been lost to Japan...
...poison, along with tons of other toxic wastes, had come from chemical plants all over Europe, partly be cause Belgium has extremely tolerant pollution laws, partly because the village of Hannêche (pop. 300) has a rather tolerant government. Specifically, Mayor Edouard Elias and his town council had struck an agreement with a newly created Belgian disposal company named Vebeka. Elias got a seat on the company board and Vebeka got a license to dump wastes in the cavernous old factory; the town would get 55? per ton of the lethal garbage. Vebeka Chief Adrianus Van den Bogert...
...mercury and cadmium to heated water from electricity plants, is defined and limited. The bill provides up to $18 billion for municipalities to build new sewage-treatment plants, with 75% of the money being paid by Washington and 25% by states and cities. It would finance the removal of toxic sludge from river and lake bottoms and also provide low-interest loans to small businesses for antipollution equipment...
...Cole announced that the company has already begun to order some tooling, which suggests that officials feel the remaining bugs can be shaken out. G.M. has also arranged to buy 420,000 ounces of South African platinum and palladium, two of the so-called noble metals that chemically transform toxic pollutants into harmless substances inside the converter chambers...
...Since surgeons first discovered that talc, a finely powdered mineral, could be toxic, they have stopped using it on the skintight rubber gloves they wear while performing operations. Now, according to the Lancet, there are indications that the starch used as a substitute may also be unsafe, leading to a potentially dangerous postoperative condition called "starch peritonitis." The condition, which develops anywhere from ten to 40 days after surgery and produces fever, cramping and abdominal pain, was first believed by doctors to be the result of intestinal obstructions. But those who reoperated discovered no blockages but pearly white nodules...