My goodness! Europe Actually Has Laws Against Exporting Its Dangerous Electronic Waste!!!

[NNadir]

Our country, thank goodness, has no such scruples. We're perfectly free to export electronic waste to China where it is conveniently disposed in the flesh of people, including children.

But Europe has laws against this sort of thing, laws that are, thankfully for the European bourgeois lifestyle, routinely ignored and violated.

ROTTERDAM, the Netherlands — When two inspectors swung open the doors of a battered red shipping container here, they confronted a graveyard of Europe’s electronic waste — old wires, electricity meters, circuit boards — mixed with remnants of cardboard and plastic.

“This is supposed to be going to China, but it isn’t going anywhere,” said Arno Vink, an inspector from the Dutch environment ministry who impounded the container because of Europe’s strict new laws that place restrictions on all types of waste exports, from dirty pipes to broken computers to household trash.

Exporting waste illegally to poor countries has become a vast and growing international business, as companies try to minimize the costs of new environmental laws, like those here, that tax waste or require that it be recycled or otherwise disposed of in an environmentally responsible way.

Rotterdam, the busiest port in Europe, has unwittingly become Europe’s main external garbage chute, a gateway for trash bound for places like China, Indonesia, India and Africa. There, electronic waste and construction debris containing toxic chemicals are often dismantled by children at great cost to their health

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/science/earth/27waste.html?_r=1&hp">NY Times: Smuggling Europe’s Waste to Poorer Countries

Without poor countries to take our electronic waste, and to generate such waste in manufacturing, how on earth do people expect us to have our $150,000 Tesla cars ($50,000 subsidized by our government) and our swell $50,000 government paid solar roofs?

[Turbineguy]

1. Yes but they

are fascists or socialists or commies or something!

[fascisthunter]

2. We should be doing here

[HamdenRice]

3. More economic and environmental word salad

Question: How is externalizing the costs of one industry (consumer electronics waste) related to reduced costs of a different industry (hybrid cars)?

Answer: It isn't.

Economic illiteracy fail.

[NNadir]

5. Well, your opinion on this matter would depend on whether you know chemistry.

If you don't know any chemistry, I suppose you would think that an electric (and the Tesla, is not a hybrid its an electric - you can look it up) is very different from consumer waste, but you would be wrong on that score.

The car has stuff like, um, rectifiers (among other things), which are solid state devices that constitute electronic waste when they burn out, but, like I said, you'd have to understand something about technology to know that. This portion of the dumb car is specifically electronic waste.

The materials implications are equally as bad, as they are in electronic waste, and include things like PBDE's and other nasty electrical insulators. I'll bet the polycarbonates in the composites are real, real, real, real, real interesting if you give a rat's ass, less so if you don't. These temperature resistant polymers are broadly known by people who, um, do know chemistry to be rather insidiously intractable polymers for any kind of recycling.

Also, if you're good at reading, you will recognize that the sarcastic OP refers to solar PV cells, which have almost exactly the same kind of waste profile as electronic consumer waste, specifically heavy metal doped silicates having wonderful heavy metals in them, like, for instance cadmium, lead, tellurium and other swell elements.

It is understood very broadly by people who actually read the scientific literature, that the bulk of external cost of solar cells is toxicological. It was found for instance in Switzerland, with the typical capacity utilization, that the external toxicological breakeven time with respect to dangerous natural gas of solar PV cells, exceeded their lifetime.

The abstract is here: http://www.springerlink.com/content/r7347txq7567357m/?p=1e61d9115c124e2aba52e57b58503fc7&pi=3">Int. J. Life Cycle Assessment, Vol 10, No. 1. 24-34, 2005

The reason this similarity, between solar PV and other consumer electronic junk, is overlooked by humanity is that PV energy has been a spectacular failure at producing energy on scale. If solar energy ever got to the point of producing just two exajoules of the more than 500 now consumed each year by humanity, I guarantee you that someone, not necessarily fundie anti-nukes, would begin to complain. However for all this endless talk, solar PV energy is not even close to getting there. It has thus far proved almost completely useless in the fight against climate change, and so, as a fantasy and not a reality, gets a bye.

Have a nice evening.

[HamdenRice]

6. Uh, no.

You would still have to document that the waste from the Tesla is the waste in question.

It isn't.

What you are arguing is the equivalent of finding waste from a microwave oven and claiming it reduces costs of a Mac PC.

Fail. Economic illiteracy.

[kristopher]

4. Right....

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x211727

"...Pressure is growing on the Italian government to act over revelations that 30 or more ships with radioactive cargoes, deliberately sunk by the Mafia, may be polluting the Mediterranean.

The Calabrian region in the south of the country last night threatened to bypass Rome and petition the European Commission directly for help in dealing with the potential environmental disaster, while in another development investigators said that human remains may have been found on one ship – raising the possibility of a murder inquiry.

Silvestro Greco, head of the region's environment agency, lambasted the response by ministers..."