Posted on 09/26/2009 12:21:30 PM PDT by reaganaut1
ROTTERDAM, the Netherlands — When two inspectors swung open the doors of a battered red shipping container here, they confronted a graveyard of Europe’s electronic waste — old wires, electricity meters, circuit boards — mixed with remnants of cardboard and plastic.
“This is supposed to be going to China, but it isn’t going anywhere,” said Arno Vink, an inspector from the Dutch environment ministry who impounded the container because of Europe’s strict new laws that place restrictions on all types of waste exports, from dirty pipes to broken computers to household trash.
Exporting waste illegally to poor countries has become a vast and growing international business, as companies try to minimize the costs of new environmental laws, like those here, that tax waste or require that it be recycled or otherwise disposed of in an environmentally responsible way.
Rotterdam, the busiest port in Europe, has unwittingly become Europe’s main external garbage chute, a gateway for trash bound for places like China, Indonesia, India and Africa. There, electronic waste and construction debris containing toxic chemicals are often dismantled by children at great cost to their health. Other garbage that is supposed to be recycled according to European law may be simply burned or left to rot, polluting air and water and releasing the heat-trapping gases linked to global warming.
...
The temptation to export waste is great because recycling properly at home is expensive: Because of Europe’s new environmental laws, it is four times as expensive to incinerate trash in the Netherlands as to put it — illegally — on a boat to China.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
enviros at work
hunh wow wonder when the 60 Minutes expose is gonna run better not hold my breath i guess.
Beached whales mystery solved.
I think this was what we all refer to as “Euro-trash”.
“Rancid Swedish Cold War meat sold to Poland”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2348378/posts
Italian mafia has been implicated in dumping barges and ships of Italian nuclear waste a few miles off the Italian coast. Italian govt. is investigating.
“Al Ahad”, i.e, “the One”, the “Messiah” has been trashing the US everywhere he travels. Has he offered these foreign dumpers to bring their trash here? It probably won’t be long before he does.
Nonsense. "global warming" caused by human activity is a LIE. A scam perpetrated by wannabe global governance Marxist elitists who want to steal wealth from the western nations and control the worlds energy resources.
I agree 100% the environazis are the new face of socialism and communism, we’d better not fall prey to this nonsense or it’s going to be a very bleak future for this country....pathetic
In the Med, that would probably help. The Med has been a toilet for decades.
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