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Cynthetiq · 07-02-2009, 04:58 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by shakran

So you're saying "leave every environmental issue up to the people and hope they get it right in time?"

I would guess that the percentage of bike riders who ride bikes for political reasons rather than that they can't afford the gas or don't want to pay for the gas without any political ulterior motives is quite small.

The Rosetta stone is 2200 years old, not 10,000 or 1 million. And the reason we were able to decipher it is because it happened to be a translation matrix that included classical Greek, which we were still able to read. Without the Rosetta stone, we'd have been unable to decipher hieroglyphics (also 8,000 to 998,000 years younger than the warning signs will be), and I should point out that hieroglyphics are pictograms. So basically under your idea we have to provide our own Rosetta stone, and hope that in 10,000 years or 1,000,000 years, assuming humanity is gone and another civilization has taken our place, that someone still knows how to read English.

France also has comprehensive national health care. Are you advocating that we do that, because France does it?

To the point, France still doesn't know what to do with its nuclear waste. They're fighting the same storage oppositions that the nuclear industry here is fighting. True, they do have a nuclear waste recycling program which delays the date that a given chunk of fuel will become waste that needs to be stores, but it also produces as a byproduct, plutonium. Having a bunch of plutonium lie around is very, very bad idea.

I already told you I'm totally fine with nuclear energy as long as we know what to do with the waste. Saying "well France isn't solving the waste problem either but they're going full steam ahead and therefore so should we," is not a solution.

Sometimes. To cherrypick your example, one side said "stop killing the dolphins," and the other said "I don't want to have to care if I kill dolphins." The compromise of "kill only half as many dolphins" wouldn't really have made anyone happy.

Saying that you can't throw them in the garbage and therefore you "can't get rid of them" demonstrates a shocking lack of knowledge of the situation. Of course you can get rid of them. Take them to a recycling center. Many battery stores will take them to the recycling center for you. It will be the same with the hybrid batteries.

Saying that you can't ever get rid of something because you can't put it in the trash is like saying you can't ever defecate again because you aren't allowed to do it in the neighbor's yard.

I get 2 times a year to recycle products. If I miss any of those two times, I wind up holding onto the objects. If not I get fined or the building that I live in gets fined if I put these things in the compactor. We already have a mandate for ratio based recycling. So for X amount of trash we "should" have Y amount of recyclables. So even if people decide they don't want to use products that require a recycle such as soda bottles, we are still penalized and fined because we didn't recycle enough.

Now I'm supposedly able to bring my cellphones to the manfacturers and they'll dispose them. Apparently disposing them means that they can refresh and repacked my old cellphone and resell it in an emerging territory. How nice of them! They get to make more money and still charge me exorbitant fees for their service. It wasn't told that this was their disposal method. So it's not really disposed, but it's still in the some use. They get to ride more for free off my sale and generate more profits in an emerging marketplace.

Quote:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/ny...10recycle.html
March 10, 2008
Engineering a Tough Switch: Getting New Yorkers to Recycle Electronics
By JOHN ELIGON

They are often wedged in closets, collecting dust. Some inevitably end up between banana peels and apple cores in a landfill. In New York City, finding an appropriate final resting place for aging computers, boom boxes and televisions can be an arduous task.

An even more daunting obstacle might be educating their owners.

As the fate of a City Council bill requiring electronic waste recycling rests on the tip of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s pen, many New Yorkers have no idea where and how to dispose of unwanted electronic items, many of which contain environmental hazards like lead and mercury.

Sabrina Brown, for example, has never heard of “e-waste” recycling.

Ms. Brown, 20, a student from Richmond Hill, Queens, said she had three cellphones, an old laptop computer, an old television, two old radios and three old cameras sitting in her room.

“I don’t know where to take them,” she said.

Mr. Bloomberg has expressed strong opposition to a bill passed by the City Council last month that would fine New Yorkers $100 for throwing electronics in the garbage and would require manufacturers to take back their products and those made by companies that are no longer in business.

Mr. Bloomberg, who says the bill penalizes manufacturers for the behavior of consumers, is expected to veto the measure this week, but the bill may have enough support in Council to pass in an override or a compromise. Whatever the bill’s form, New Yorkers already have several opportunities to recycle their electronics, including collection events sponsored by the city’s Sanitation Department twice a year.

So we're trying to enact laws that force the manufacturer to deal with this. You can see that manufacturers are lobbying hard to not let such a thing happen as it is cost prohibitive to some if not flat out unfair even if they do not sell product in our state.

Come by NYC sometime, you'll see on street corners from time to time old CPU cases sometimes with full contents including hard drives, old printers, old monitors. People have actually taken the hard drives out, recovered them and used the data for identity theft, or expose the original owner and fear monger more identity theft because of someone else's bad judgment on disposal method.

I have other articles on how many people have TVs sitting in their closets because they don't know what to do with them before and after the digital switchover.

Quote:

Electronics Firms Fight State Recycling Programs - WSJ.com
Meanwhile, the Consumer Electronics Association, a trade group representing 2,000 electronics companies, is negotiating with the New York City officials to change a city ordinance that would require electronics companies to pick up old gadgets door-to-door.

The CEA says the ordinance, scheduled to take effect July 31, would cost the industry $200 million annually.

"We're extremely alarmed" by electronic recycling laws, says Bill Taraday, president of ToteVision, a Seattle maker of LCD screens with annual sales of about $10 million. ToteVision has had to pay 4% of its profits to cover its recycling bills in Washington since January, he says. If legislation like this existed in all 50 states, "we wouldn't be in business," Mr. Taraday says.

Surely the French are putting the waste in some space and taking care of that space. Same with the US for their small stock of nuclear power generators, aircraft carriers and submarines. Yucca Mountain in my opinion is more NIMBY fearmongering. Again, if I have to change, you have to a little also. Apparently the immediacy for greenhouse gases is so great, but the fear of radioactive materials and their storage is even greater.

People are living in Nagasaki and Hiroshima years after detonation of nuclear material. Chernobyl is going to recover over time as well.

Quote:

Darkness at Noon: Chernobyl: life after death, or somewhere in between
What I found, much to my surprise, was a place characterized by abundant life. The most startling aspect was the human life within the Chernobyl exclusion zone and at the nuclear power plant itself. In fact, 4,000 people are still employed by the power plant and work there on a regular basis. They are the workers who not only monitor reactor four and maintain the aging sarcophagus, but also those who are carrying out the closure of the remaining reactors, the last of which was finally shut off in 2000.

They work and even live inside the exclusion zone because this is their job. The guide at the power plant's visitor center tells us with a tinge of sadness in her voice that "back when the disaster first occurred people rushed here to help contain the situation because it was their duty - they were motivated by love of their country and they paid a high price. Now they come [to work on the Sarcophagus] because they need the work, they don't have a choice." We are told that the power plant takes the health of its workers very seriously - if anybody shows signs of radiation-related illness, they are immediately and permanently removed from the exclusion zone. Discovering the ironies that populate the darker corners of life, someone in our group asks, "doesn't that mean they lose their job, too?" The guide shrugs with a melancholy look of regret on her face and nods her head.

A much different vision of life can be found in Pripyat, the model Soviet city built in the 1970s to house the population that would be working at the Soviet Union's latest wonder-achievement, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Home to nearly 50,000 residents at the time of the accident in 1986, the city was evacuated three days after the explosion, never to be repopulated again. Because the residents were told that they would be able to return soon, they left most of their belongings behind. In fact, they left their lives behind to be re-created in the minds of visitors like myself 22 years later, picturing the daily experiences of an apartment's inhabitants as we carefully step over the broken glass and fallen radiator on the floor.

Contrary of the image in my mind of a barren, windswept cityscape permanently drained of life by the events of that day, in fact life is everywhere. 22 years without human interference has had a startling effect as the forest has gradually reclaimed the territory it was once forced to concede in the name of socialist progress. Houses have been engulfed by the forest, apartment buildings dwarfed by the trees, and streets and sidewalks obscured by moss until little trace of them remains. Nature has even found its way inside several buildings, with trees, shrubbery, and grass growing out the windows from within. We see the telltale evidence of wild boars that wander the city rooting up tasty morsels from her soft, mossy soil. We are told that herds of wild horses roam freely on the open plains, and that native zubry (European bison) will soon be re-introduced to the area.

Quote:

FRONTLINE: nuclear reaction: Why the French Like Nuclear Energy
Bataille went and spoke to the people who were protesting and soon realized that the engineers and bureaucrats had greatly misunderstood the psychology of the French people. The technocrats had seen the problem in technical terms. To them, the cheapest and safest solution was to permanently bury the waste underground. But for the rural French says Bataille, "the idea of burying the waste awoke the most profound human myths. In France we bury the dead, we don't bury nuclear waste...there was an idea of profanation of the soil, desecration of the Earth."

Bataille discovered that the rural populations had an idea of "Parisians, the consumers of electricity, coming to the countryside, going to the bottom of your garden with a spade, digging a hole and burying nuclear waste, permanently." Using the word permanently was especially clumsy says Bataille because it left the impression that the authorities were abandoning the waste forever and would never come back to take care of it.

Fighting the objections of technical experts who argued it would increase costs, Bataille introduced the notions of reversibility and stocking. Waste should not be buried permanently but rather stocked in a way that made it accessible at some time in the future. People felt much happier with the idea of a "stocking center" than a "nuclear graveyard". Was this just a semantic difference? No, says Bataille. Stocking waste and watching it involves a commitment to the future. It implies that the waste will not be forgotten. It implies that the authorities will continue to be responsible. And, says Bataille, it offers some possibility of future advances. "Today we stock containers of waste because currently scientists don't know how to reduce or eliminate the toxicity, but maybe in 100 years perhaps scientists will."

Bataille began working on a new law that he presented to parliament in 1991. It laid plans to build 3-4 research laboratories at various sites. These laboratories would be charged with investigating various options, including deep geological storage, above ground stocking and transmutation and detoxification of waste. The law calls for the labs to be built in the next few years and then, based on the research they yield, parliament will decide its final decision. Bataille's law specifies 2006 as the year in which parliament must decide which laboratory will become the national stocking center

Bataille's plan seems to be working. Several regions have applied to host underground laboratories hoping the labs will bring in money and high prestige scientific jobs. But ultimate success is by no means certain. One of these laboratories will, in effect, become the stocking center for the nation and the local people may find that unacceptable. If protesters organize, they can block shipments on the roads and rail. The situation could quickly get out of hand.

Nuclear waste is an enormously difficult political problem which to date no country has solved. It is, in a sense, the Achilles heel of the nuclear industry. Could this issue strike down France's uniquely successful nuclear program? France's politicians and technocrats are in no doubt. If France is unable to solve this issue, says Mandil, then "I do not see how we can continue our nuclear program."

I find it more acceptable that they are making attempts to figure it out than just say, "We don't know what to do with it, so we're not doing anything." Even if as they say it takes 100 years, they have emitted less of the offending greenhouse gases and associated pollutants, but of course traded that off for nuclear material which is a bit more localized.

---------- Post added at 08:58 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:34 AM ----------

here's a new one, and yet more reasons why I don't trust legislation to deal with this. While this is very tangible materials, the idea of the rest of the emissions in my opinion is not truly measurable it is just best guess on behavior in a slice of time. Depending on what time of the year it is, my electricity usage goes up and my oil burning goes down and my electricity usage goes down and my oil burning goes up. My driving also fluctuates. I assume it is not much different with companies, and again, if you can't stick a meteric on it that says EXACTLY how much, it's not any better than the policy of assessing property value for property taxes. When the city needs more money, they asses the value higher or give a higher percentage multiplier. Either way, it's a best guess with no rhyme or reason.

As far as the recycling.... yeah good job on that one!

YouTube - E-Waste: Dumping on the Poor ????????

Quote:

Monday, Jun. 30, 2008
Your Laptop's Dirty Little Secret
By Bryan Walsh

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.

But the 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 China, India and Nigeria, to which rich countries have been shipping garbage for years. There the poor, often including children, dismantle dumped PCs and phones, stripping the components for the valuable — and toxic — metals contained inside. In the cities like the southern Chinese town of Guiyu, they work with little protection, melting down components and breathing in poisonous fumes. What can't be recycled is simply dumped, turning already poisoned rivers into toxic sludge. It's all done in the hope of earning a few dollars from the detritus of the clean digital economy.

Michael Zhao has seen the damage firsthand. A journalist connected with the Asia Society, Zhao traveled to Guiyu — which processes up to 1 million tons of electronic garbage a year — to film a documentary on the impact of e-waste. "I saw people putting leftover parts on coal fired stoves, to melt down the waste to get to the gold," he says. "It'd produce a reddish smoke that was so strong I couldn't stand there for more than a couple minutes before my eyes would just burn." (Hear Zhao talk about the e-waste on this week's Greencast.) Urban China is so polluted that few Chinese escape without some damage to their health, but Zhao says that local researchers have found that the children of Guiyu fare worse than their counterparts in nearby cities, suffering from respiratory illnesses traced back to e-waste.

Officially, this shouldn't be happening. The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal was established by the UN in 1989 to 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 the agreement had failed, and pointed to the growth in e-waste as a main reason. "We are faced with the ugly truth that the Basel Convention has been unable to accomplish even the prerequisite steps of addressing the inequities and exploitation made possible by globalization," Jim Puckett, director of the Seattle-based Basel Action Network, told delegates at Bali.