[Moogs]

We've all heard about Dell and Apple being tested by environmental groups over the use of certain materials and chemicals in their computers, but the larger picture is that many countries in the west are dumping their worthless computers into landfills in China, India and Africa in some cases. I saw something about this on 60 minutes a while back and it's pretty frickin disturbing. Both the US and UK are big contributors to this problem. And the scariest part of the 60 Minutes thing was that they followed computers and TVs from a huge "Recycling Drive" somewhere (outside of Denver I think), and truckloads of them ended up in the Chinese dump... and here's this supposedly "Earth Friendly" business / owner looking the camera in the eye saying his stuff doesn't get dumped. F-ing mind-boggling that in this day and age people still take the "out of sight, out of mind" attitude. People -especially those pretending to be eco-friendly businesses re-cycling stuff- should be prosecuted no different than a murderer, because they are in fact killing people. Slowly. Scum of the earth to put up such a "green facade" and then just dump stuff on people, like you're a 1970s chemical plant manager or something.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7543489.stm

[Maciej]

I saw the same program. With the owners of the dump in China getting all defensive because their workers were melting down components that released toxic gases. Nasty stuff, gets into the water, into the soil, into the food and into the children. No good.

[Chinney]

The thing is, there are some valuable materials in there, if properly recycled. But just as it costs less to manufacture in China, due to pitiful labour and environmental standards, it cost less to recycle there too, just as it costs less there to dump the materials that are not going to be recycled.

But we are not doing ourselves, or the Chinese any favours by doing it that way. Low wages for dangerous work provides marginal long term benefits to the Chinese, while putting domestic workers out of a job - jobs that could be done safely and for better pay if done here. And the environmental costs are ones that we will all pay in the long run - it's just one earth. It all makes things a bit cheaper at Walmart, but the full cost vs. benefit is not being factored in.

Free trade was sold as a huge benefit under economic theory, but the way it was set up was terrible. The system did not work because it did not take into account externalities noted above, and one more as well: that the U.S and Canada can only borrow so much money from China to pay for the goods the average North American can't really afford any more without borrowing because they don't have good enough jobs and that the average Chinese never could afford because the benefits of the new system did not extend to most of them.

The people who did benefit, around the world, were the top 5%, and even more so, the top 1%, and even more so the top echelons of that 1%. The economic boom of the last number of years created an incredible concentration of wealth at the very, very, top - the people who received yearly bonuses larger than the lifetime salaries of even middle-tier employees, even as the taxes were cut of those at the top. As Dick Cheney famously said "This is our due." These are the same people who ran the system into ground. And guess what, those people still have their money - all those bonuses in the millions and tens of millions of dollars a year that they received for doing such a bad job. All those CEOs and former CEOs being called to testify before Congress. They might find the questioning a bit tough, but they still have the money and they get to keep it. The rest of the world, meanwhile, is left to clean up the financial and environmental mess.

[Elysium]

Originally Posted by Moogs Slowly. Scum of the earth to put up such a "green facade" and then just dump stuff on people, like you're a 1970s chemical plant manager or something. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7543489.stm

Hey now, those chemical plant scumbags keep me getting paid.

[billybobsky]

Originally Posted by Maciej I saw the same program. With the owners of the dump in China getting all defensive because their workers were melting down components that released toxic gases. Nasty stuff, gets into the water, into the soil, into the food and into the children. No good.

mmm, tastes like computery chicken...

[Maciej]

Originally Posted by billybobsky mmm, tastes like computery chicken...

Delicious isn't it?

[Moogs]

Nothing says "come and get it!" like Mercury-marinated chicken and PCB Bruchetta.

Seriously... it's messed up. And to be clear Chins... when I say "dump", I mean as in, dumped on the side of the road / in someone's back yard. Not dumped at a Chinese factory. Although in the end it would probably end up in the same yard in that case, but at least sans some of the valuable-and-also-toxic materials.

But your points about "global free trade" are well founded. Seems the people on top looking for "their due", decided to cut corners every way they could to get the maximum amount as quickly as possible, then jump ship. I don't know how we fix these problems but I fear all levels of government and business are too much joined at the hip... anything that would cause real change / pain to the executive officers of the world, will be brushed aside in favor of some softer response.

There are people in my extended family who worked corporate America for over 3 decades, climbing their way up, etc. Somehow, they attained some pretty lofty positions without getting their mega-millions that they were "due" or bankrupting companies, etc. Makes you wonder just how crooked these top executives over the last 15 years really are.