Garbage!

From Physorg:

China's waste import ban upends global recycling industry

much of the recycled stuff, mainly plastic, went to China in the past.

The Chinese government says it is concerned about hazardous materials mixed with the waste the country imports to recycle

interesting article.

Here, plastic bags are thown and and clog the sewers (getting better now that there are waste containers on the street and the drainage ditches are covered).

But poor people collect the pastic bottles (and glass ones) to sell to recylers.

You can drop lithium batteries off at the mall (don't know about regular ones).

But my main worry is those flourescent light bulbs, which contain mercury. I haven't seen a place to recycle them, but they are dangerous to the environment. The EPA insists it is a minor problem in contrast to the mercury released by coal burning plants, but that is not comforting to us.

You see, rice is notorious for it's ability to absorb heavy metals, (NYTimes article). Much of the problems discussed here is cadmium from mining run off in China, but it has lessons for most of rice eating Asia.

it is dawning on scientists like her that rice, one of the most widely consumed foods in the world, is also one of nature’s great scavengers of metallic compounds.... 

it’s not just arsenic and cadmium...Recent studies have shown that rice is custom-built to pull a number of metals from the soil, among them mercury and even tungsten...

The highest levels often occur in brown rice, because elements like arsenic accumulate in bran and husk, which are polished off in the processing of white rice.

and we grow organic brown rice. UhOh.

It is hard to find the old fashioned type of light bulbs here, and although we are busy replacing our flourescent type light bulbs with LED types, they cost too much for the poor. And the poor tend to throw trash in the irrigation ditches or the vacant lots.

so where are the light bulbs being discarded?

Unlike plastic bags, I don't usually see them in our trash bins or in the vacant lots, but I do wonder if this might be a problem in the near future in poor rice eating countries.