American Toxic E-Waste Not Being Recycled Here But Instead Ending Up In China.
My friend Matt from Steadfast Finances sent me the link to the story, and I watched this on TV Sunday evening and it made me ill. Watching recycling companies send our toxic e-waste illegally to China and disposing it in one of the most toxic places on earth was heart-wrenching and shameful all at the same time. What is wrong with these people??
60 Minutes is going to take you to one of the most toxic places on Earth – a place government officials and gangsters don’t want you to see. It’s a town in China where you can’t breathe the air or drink the water, a town where the blood of the children is laced with lead.
It’s worth risking a visit because much of the poison is coming out of the homes, schools and offices of America. This is a story about recycling – about how your best intentions to be green can be channeled into an underground sewer that flows from the United States and into the wasteland.
Executive Recycling, of Englewood, Colo., which ran the Denver event, promised the public on its Web site: “Your e-waste is recycled properly, right here in the U.S. – not simply dumped on somebody else.”
Executive does recycling in-house, but 60 Minutes was curious about shipping containers that were leaving its Colorado yard. 60 Minutes found one container filled with monitors. They’re especially hazardous because each picture tube, called a cathode ray tube or CRT, contains several pounds of lead. It’s against U.S. law to ship them overseas without special permission. 60 Minutes took down the container’s number and followed it to Tacoma, Wash., where it was loaded on a ship. It turns out the container that started in Denver was just one of thousands of containers on an underground, often illegal smuggling route, taking America’s electronic trash to the Far East.
Seriously sickening. In the video we see how the air is filled with toxic smoke and the water is undrinkable, yet we watch kids play in the ponds and women wash clothes in the dangerously toxic water – all created from American e-waste that is supposed to be recycled correctly right here in the U.S.. These criminals should be in jail – or better yet, be made to clean up their mess with their bare hands. I will be looking into this for a future article and will try to come up with a list of recycling companies that are not on a list mentioned in the article of 42 other companies busted for doing the same thing as Executive Recycling. Sick.
Related posts:
- Vinyl Shower Curtains Can Release Up To 100 Toxic Chemicals.
- Is It Any Wonder Why Stuff Coming From China Can Be Dangerous?
- What is toxic, and what is not?
- Best Products for Non-Toxic Cleaning
- Downloadable Guide To Toxic Chemicals Found In Flea Control Products.
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There are no words to type that convey my level of speachlessness.
I’ve known about this for a while, and it makes me VERY ANGRY *becomes green and muscled*. HULK SMASH! No, seriously, is there anyone bringing the law against this practice?
People are trying, for sure…
This is unbelieveable. I’ll be writing about this, they issue with such hazard is the lack of coverage on health on third world countries.
I watched this in disgust as well on Sunday. I was disappointed however in the fact that 60 Minutes offered no alternative/other companies which are NOT conducting this horrible practice. I’ll be interested to see what you find. Thanks for posting about it!
Wow. I’m nauseated too. This is disgraceful. Heartbreaking. Disturbing. And leaving me distrustful of where to take my e-waste…
So we have proof…live footage of this happening today and it is still an ongoing operation? We’re still sitting here watching kids play in water that might as well be nuclear waste. The greedy business owners are worrying about this getting blown out of proportion when it clearly is. How is this still happening?