Word: toxication
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Coal, steel, oil - we think of these old-economy industries, and we picture pollution. Smoggy skies, fouled rivers, toxic waste. As we make the transition to a new economy, we imagine that industrial pollution will become a thing of the past. Mobile phones, laptops, MP3 players - they conjure images of spotless semiconductor factories and the eternal summer of Silicon Valley where the digital economy was born...
...tech industry has a dirty little secret: it has toxic waste of its own. Phones and computers contain dangerous metals like lead, cadmium and mercury, which can contaminate the air and water when those products are dumped. It's called electronic waste, or e-waste, and the world produces a lot of it: 20 to 50 million tons a year, according to the UN - enough to load a train that would stretch around the world. The U.S. is by far the world's top producer of e-waste, but much of it ends up elsewhere - specifically, in developing nations like...
...control the hazardous garbage flowing from rich countries to poor ones. The convention allows countries to unilaterally ban the import of waste, and requires exporters to get the consent of destination countries before they send trash abroad. But the United States, a prime source of e-waste and other toxic waste, never signed onto the treaty, leaving it weakened, and some of the destination nations - most prominently China - quietly allow the dumping to continue, for the money it brings in. At an international summit on the convention held last week in Bali, Indonesia, environmentalists and many poor countries insisted...
...take care of the waste at home. "This is effectively long-distance dumping," said Achim Steiner, head of the United Nations Environment Programme. One solution is to promote recycling programs for old PCs and phones, as Dell has done recently, or try to reduce the amount of toxic metals used in those products, as Apple has done. The answer will almost certainly have to come from rich importers - for poor nations, the money that can be made off the e-waste trade is simply too good to abandon, despite the environmental and health costs...
...eighth house, suggested Monica at Astrology Mundo, who had predicted a flare-up of teen sex around the summer solstice. The culture was an irresistible target, after movies like Juno "glamorized" unwed motherhood; if only the school's "marauding narcissistic sluts" hadn't followed the toxic example of movie stars and the Spears sisters, wrote some bloggers, who longed for the return of the scarlet letter...