Ancient Romans knew that mercury was poisonous. They got convicted criminals to extract it from cinnabar ore, then they mixed it with gold to gild objects. These miners lasted an average of about three years before they lost their hair, their teeth, and eventually their sanity. (p. 161)
Wildfires and volcanoes produce about a third of the mercury in today’s atmosphere. Coal-fired power plants and incinerators that burn mercury-containing wastes (batteries, thermostats, and computer circuit boards...) generate the rest….The problem with mercury is that once it becomes airborne, it mixes with rain and snow, then settles on lakes and waterways, where bacteria convert it to methylmercury, which works it way up the food chain. Over time, exposure to elemental mercury causes permanent, and sometimes fatal, kidney and neurological damage, hair and teeth loss. (p. 162)
The industrial world bristles with entrepreneurs jostling to get their hands on mercury from household products and industry….Chlorine producers who have given up mercury in favor of new technologies, for example, have vast quantities on hand. But they are spinning liability into a commodity bound for developing nations that haven’t banned its use. …While mercury flows in one direction –from nations that enforce environmental protections to nations that do not– its hazards are multidirectional. The element vaporizes with ease, and so its poison drifts with the breeze. The local hazards of mercury are global. (pp.162-163)
What will the garbage landscape look like in fifty or a hundred years? Already, the stuff we set on the curb is circling back to bite us. We burn our electronic waste, and its chemical fallout show up in the breast milk of Eskimos and in the flesh of animals we eat. We bury our household waste, and poisons rise into our air and leach into our waterways. We can recycle and compose as much as we want, but if the total waste stream continue to grow, we’ll never escape our own mess. For better or for worse, consumers and producers respond to economic arguments: if we don’t wake up and make the connection between our economy and the environment (which provide the resources to make all our stuff), the planet will eventually do it for us. And it won’t be pretty. (pp. 293-294)
Source:
Elizabeth Royte, Garbage Land; On the Secret Trail of Trash. (New York, NY: Little, Brown, and Company, 2005)
