Hi-tech trash a global threat
Article about high tech trash accumulating around the world: "As the life cycle of electronic equipment shrinks, outdated products like VCRs get replaced by DVD players and our landfills quickly overflow with hi-tech trash. In fact, "obsolete" electronics have become the fastest growing waste stream in the industrialized world." (more)
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In today's (February 13th) San Diego Union Tribune paper there was an article featured on the front page called “A Lingering, Toxic Mess” which spoke about an issue dealing with week 2’s topic of “The world’s global city-regions are increasingly interdependent economically and ecologically.”
Over 20 million people in three states depend on the water supplied by the Colorado River; San Diego alone draws 2/3 of our water supply from the river. In 2000, then-U.S. Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson had thought he succeeded in getting 10 million tons of radioactive waste moved from the banks of the river in the area of Moab, Utah. The 130-acre waste area, consisting of uranium, arsenic, radium-226 and other poisonous chemicals, once leaked as much as 28,000 gallons of the waste into the river a day. Now five years later, the pile of chemicals still lays intact in the location and leaks 15,000 gallons of toxic chemicals into the river a day. It has also been threatened by local government officials and environmentalists that a cataclysmic flood could wash the entire pile into the river. Under legislation signed by former President Clinton, the government was ordered to clean up and relocate the piles, yet the Bush administration has nearly stopped the project. The pile was originally created in the 1950’s “as a waste site for a mill that processed uranium ore for atomic weapons and nuclear reactors (during the Cold War), [and] is the largest radioactive dump remaining by the edge of a major river.” This common practice continued years later, when in the 1980’s the government spent close to $2 billion moving other, “smaller and less polluting” piles of waste to other sites. However, to add to the case of Moab’s dump of chemical waste, the town had originally relied on the uranium mill and the millions of dollars the business brought into the once small, cattle ranching and peach orchard town; the town’s revenue now comes from tourism.
The biggest concern is focused on the consequences from a possible flood which “would be serious adverse impacts of the plants and animals and on the health of the people who live and work along the river.” (Sounds like the Erin Brockavitch story).
By Erin K., at 12:23 AM
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