E-Stork II: Where Poisoned e-Waste Babies Come From

The first E-Stork post was a tale of three rivers:  Blackstone, Louhrajang, and Cape Fear.  Each poisoned river was traced upstream;  in each case, a textile mill was found.

When science sends journalists upstream, to witness the cause of pollution,  it's excusable to use a poster child baby in the story.  In the case of the Blackstone River, Saturday Evening Post stories about mill working children brought the pollution of the river into stark, cognitive risk.  Laws corrected the textile mills, and the rivers healed.

China's industrial revolution looks a lot like the Blackstone River Valley in the early 1900s.  Regulations may be ignored, but ignoring regulations is being documented.   This group of professors in China is bringing attention to an unpermitted steel mill (shanghaiscrap.com).  They aren't using baby pictures, but they are generating attention by being viral on the web.

Consensus over regulation begins with facts and science, getting the upstream and downstream on the table.   Annie Leonard is right about demand for "Stuff" driving competition to cut corners.   But the WSJ is also right, that cheaper goods benefit the poorest people (both in manufacturing and consumption).  It's easy for the rich to assert that Cheap is Bad.   If it helps you sleep at night to wear certified organic wool, good for you.

EPA took an important step in 2008 to try to bring groups to the table to air out such a compromise, in what eventually was labelled R2 or Responsible Recycler certification.

E-Stork I: Where Poisoned e-Waste Babies Come From

Part I:   Just returned from a Middlebury College Environmental Studies Event... Zbignew Brzinski headlined a presentation on Fresh Water Shortages in China; Christine E. Boyle, a Fulbright Scholar from NC, presented on China's water policy.

China needs to get very serious about water.  The easiest way to conserve water is to charge what it costs to consume - or costs to DESPOIL it.  Whether to tax water at industry or to tax it at households...

Clean water policy has an important history in the USA.  The Blackstone River laws passed in Massachusetts in 1912 were a turning point for the industrial revolution.  The Clean Water Act of 1972 became important to the recycling industy, because it gave more value to recycled office paper  - because it was pre-bleached.  When the mills had to pay more to bleach fibers, office paper became more valuable.

E-Waste Watchdogs say a significant source of Chinese water pollution comes from primitive computer recycling.  At least, that's what we are told despoiled the river in Guiyu.  The allegation that most of that dumping came from imports from the USA has been largely discredited - Beijing alone generates 8 million pieces of "ewaste" per year, according to China Daily.

Irregardless whether the junk computers in Guiyu come from Chinese collectors, or from American non-e-steward recycling companies, polluting fresh water is unsustainable. As a former environmental regulator, I know there is one important step in investigating river pollution.

Arsenic in a water sample... it's normal to look upstream.

When high levels of arsenic were found in the West Bengal rivers in India and Bangladesh, it became one of the most researched rivers in the world.  The Louhajang River was  investigated upstream.   They found this textile manufacturing center was dumping dye, flame retardant, and bleach straight into the bloody river.