It goes without saying we've got a true global crisis related to waste--literally, garbage.
Remember the Mobro 4000? The barge that left a Long Island, NY harbor in 1987 with 3,100 tons of solid waste and traveled some 6,000 miles over a 5 month period looking for someplace to unload it? The waste was refused by: North Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, New Jersey, the Bahamas, Mexico, and Belize. The "geniuses" who came up with the private enterprise eventually declared bankruptcy and left the stinking problem to be dealt with by New York City.
What's more disturbing than how we'll deal with solid waste a decade from now, is how the U.S. and Canada are dealing with toxic e-waste right now!
E-waste. Discarded computers, printers, ink and toner cartridges, monitors, cellphones, cameras, keyboards, laptops, cables, drives, televisions, etc. Most of these items (anything with a circuit board) contain highly toxic materials like lead, cadmium, mercury and beryllium. Toxic, too, is the plastic housing of these items, containing poisonous flame-retardant chemicals.
Check out your local listings for companies which specialize in "reclamation," "asset recovery," and/or responsible recycling of e-waste. More importantly, find out what they're actually doing with these materials. It's not enough to say they are diverting the waste from landfills.
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Remember, all twenty-seven European nations have made it illegal to dump this toxic waste on developing countries.
Currently, the lone holdout to signing the Basel Convention is the United States. What? Taking responsibity for our toxic waste is too great a burden on business?
Make sure your local/regional e-waste recyclers are certified e-stewards. Surely, the richest nation in the world can do better than this.