Group items tagged

Recyclers can make money from selling scavenged metal from electronic

equipment,

the process to retrieve usable metals is typically extremely toxic

repairable electronic waste to be exempt from the international Basel Convention hazardous waste trade control procedures.

developing countries cannot control the junk electronic computers, faxes, printers and TVs flooding into their countries from North America and Europe

digital dump

Dye houses in India and China are notorious for not only exhausting local water supplies, but for dumping untreated wastewater into local streams and rivers.

cotton and polyester, the two most mass marketed textiles

Waterless dyeing should be the textile industry's holy grail

recycling most materials from municipal solid waste saves on average three to five times more energy than does burning them for electricity.

As it turns out, countries with the highest rates of garbage incineration — Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, for example, all incinerate at least 50 percent of their waste — also tend to have high rates of recycling and composting of organic materials and food waste. But zero-wasters argue that were it not for large-scale incineration, these environmentally Zero-waste advocates say a major problem is the long-term contracts that waste-to-energy plants are locked into.conscious countries would have even higher rates of recycling. Germany, for example, incinerates 37 percent of its waste and recycles 45 percent — a considerably better recycling rate than the 30-plus percent of Scandinavian countries.

(In the United States, more than half of all waste is dumped in landfills, and about 12 percent burned, of which only a portion is used to produce energy.)