CRT Recycling Primer

What is inside a CRT that makes it so dangerous?

Here's a good 6 minute video that explains the "picture tube" or TV (from The Secret Life of Machines)



The leaded glass protects us from the radiation-like cathode rays.   Barium does the same thing (blocks the rays), but has a much higher melting point than leaded glass and is more expensive to make.  So they use barium in the "panel" (the front part) and leaded silicate in the rest of the glass.

The lead is vitrified or melted into the glass, which is about as safe a way to store lead as can be imagined.  Vitrification - binding into molten glass - is a form of haz mat storage that is used for really expensive waste materials such as plutonium waste.

But if recyclers eliminate labor and shred barium and leaded glass together, they get something much less useful.  The melting point of the leaded bits is lower than the barium bits, and the barium bits float around like stubborn ice cubes if you melt it at leaded-glass temperatures.  So people who shredded them together have fewer interested buyers and have to pay more to make their piles go away.

So, what's the stupidest thing you can do?  Ask California.  Tax people to grind it up into sand, like shown in this CA film.  This takes it from the safe form (CRT glass actually has less vitrified lead than fine leaded glass crystal ware) and frees it to be dispersed into the environment.

Why does California do this?

An organization in Seattle called BAN dupes people into thinking that the CRTs sent to THIS FACTORY

To be made into THIS product,

sold to medical students at THIS STORE

Was actually sent to THIS woman, who was nowhere to be seen on the CBS 60 Minutes video, and which BAN director Jim Puckett announced was nowhere to be seen in Guiyu at a presentation to Interpol and EPA


















 So to prevent that, CA taxes people to grind it into sand like THIS

so that it can be put into concrete likeTHIS

Which will eventually wind up deteriorating, like THIS, poisoning the soil like lead paint chips,

And so we will mine new lead from THIS mine in Africa (Kabwe, the most toxic place on earth)

 To be made into brand new CRTs which Egyptians cannot afford.


Who did this?  My friends, the Environmentalists.
This is because the environmental movement has been infiltrated by bad social science.  
As Walt Kelley coined, "We have met the enemy, and he is US."