toxic

Millions of kids are condemned to die or suffer severe brain damage because there is no money to clean up toxic sites and neighborhoods. One or two billion dollars would solve the problem permanently but health advocates have to beg and plead to get maybe $20-$30 million. Wall Street’s 2010 bonus and salaries are estimated to total a record-breaking $144 billion for just 36 firms according to Wall Street Journal.

Don’t you think they could donate 1 per cent of their ‘earnings’? — Stephen

By Stephen Leahy

UXBRIDGE, Canada, Nov 11, 2010 (IPS)

One of the world’s biggest health threats is also one of the least recognised – more than 100 million people who literally breathe and eat toxic pollutants like lead, mercury, chromium every day, according to the first-ever detailed assessment.

By contrast, global attention and billions of dollars are focused on AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, which affect comparable numbers of people.

“Toxic pollution has been under the radar screen of most governments for some time,” said Stephan Robinson of Green Cross Switzerland, a group focused on environmental health, and co-author of the assessment titled “World’s Worst Pollution Problems Report 2010”.

“These pollution problems can be dealt with affordably and effectively,” Robinson told IPS.

Past clean-up projects designed by the groups range from the very low-tech, low-cost to more technical engineering projects involving soil removal at playgrounds and groundwater remediation, he said. Continue reading →

By Stephen Leahy

Mobile telephones in Latin America and across the developing world will contain less toxic materials, thanks to strict European standards, analysts say.

TORONTO, Jan 6 2007 (Tierramérica)

Cellular telephones that contain toxic chemicals are still being sold in Latin America and other developing regions. But thanks to strict European regulations, there are progressively fewer phones being made with cadmium, lead and other dangerous materials.

The new, stricter standards adopted by the European Union in 2006, forced the world’s five leading cell phone manufacturers to eliminate toxic metals and other materials from their products.

In a year or two, the majority of the more than one billion new mobiles sold annually will meet the EU standards even if most countries don’t have those restrictions, says Zeina Alhajj, a toxics expert with the environmental watchdog Greenpeace International.

“The mobile phone is a global product with screws made in China, silicon chips made in Malaysia, and cables made in the Philippines,” Alhajj told Tierramérica from Amsterdam.

It would be too complicated to manufacture phones to meet different standards, so the big companies are making all their phones meet European regulations, which are the toughest in the world, she added. Continue reading →