Skip to main content

You could be eating a side of e-waste with your takeout

[ad_1]


Plastic is all around us: in oceans, food, landfills, and pretty much any other place you can think of, up to and including the Arctic. But while most plastics follow a predictable cycle—breaking down into smaller and smaller bits and doing damage at every point—in terms of chemical composition, not all plastics are created equal. A new UK study demonstrates that some plastic consumer products, from takeout containers to children’s toys, are made from black plastic e-waste, meaning they’re contaminated with the dangerous heavy metals and other compounds that help make the electronic gear pervading the lives of people around the globe.



Black plastics (that is, literally plastics that are black) are colored with carbon black, which is in many cases produced by burning petroleum byproducts. They’re also not recyclable by regular means: the recycling process we send most of our plastics through works by using near-infrared light radiation to break down the material so we can make it into something else. But black plastic doesn’t break down under the low-intensity radiation that works on, say, clear plastic bottles. That means regular recycling facilities in the United Kingdom and in North America can’t process black plastic takeout containers or other items. Instead, that stuff heads for the landfill.



But black is often an aesthetically pleasing choice—just look at electronics themselves, where items like monitors and keyboards have gone from ‘90s beige to, frequently, black. “There is a demand for black products,” says Andrew Turner, an environmental scientist from the University of Plymouth who authored the study, “so perhaps a convenient source of black plastic is electronic waste.” And the other thing about black plastic is that it can’t be re-dyed into green plastic, or white plastic: once it’s black, it’s black.


E-waste, which takes the form of old cell phones, computers, televisions, and myriad other items, is full of valuable and often toxic materials. The plastic that’s used in electronics is treated with chemicals like bromine and antimony and heavy metals like lead, to make it flame-retardant and otherwise suitable for electronics.



Once plastic goes into electronics, it’s only supposed to be recycled into more electronics. Recyclers of black plastic, many of whom are located in China or the Middle East, “are supposed to separate the plastic according to whether it’s safe or not safe [for reuse in consumer applications],” he says. But the evidence he gathered shows that’s not happening, at least for many black plastics reaching the United Kingdom.



Turner looked at more than 600 individual items. To figure out what each one contained, he bombarded them with X-rays and studied the reflected light. Different compounds light up at different wavelengths, so he could tell what each coffee mug, clothes hanger, and toy car contained. The results weren’t great: he found more than the legal limits of worrisome chemicals and heavy metals in a number of the items. Given the global supply chains that give us our electronics, toys, and other plastic goods, Turner says he would expect to find similar results in the United States.



At the moment, there’s no way to know exactly where in the supply chain the black plastic from e-waste is entering the manufacturing process for non-electronic household items, Turner says. He’s hoping that his future research will help them understand the process as well as figure out whether the harmful substances are leaching out and being ingested or absorbed by consumers.



“The evidence that plastic casings from waste electronic and electrical equipment is being recycled into other materials where consumers may be exposed to toxic additives is very concerning,” said chemist Jeffrey Weidenhamer, who frequently uses the same x-ray technique in his work, in an email interview with Popular Science, “and certainly calls for additional research and actions to prevent this contamination.”




[ad_2]

Written By Kat Eschner

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ice technicians are the secret stars of the Winter Olympics

[ad_1] The emphasis of this year's two-week-long Winter Olympic Games has been placed squarely on the Olympians themselves. After all, the stated purpose of the international competition is to bring together the world’s greatest athletes in a nail-biting competition across fifteen different winter sports. But before the curlers, skiers, and skaters even arrived in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the Olympians of the ice technician world were already a few weeks deep in a competition of their own. Mark Callan of the World Curling Federation and Markus Aschauer of the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation both say they’re hoping to make the best ice the Winter Olympics have ever seen. To transform the barren concrete jungle of existing tracks and arenas into an ice- and snow-covered wonderland is an enormous undertaking. And it takes a keen understanding of the physics and chemistry that keeps frozen precipitation pristine. Curling Callan has been making and maintaining ic...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to avoid the mid-movie bathroom break

[ad_1] Long movies and the urge to pee have been linked since the early days of cinema. Sixty-three years before Avengers: Endgame and its three-hour runtime, moviegoers settled in for nearly four hours of The Ten Commandments . “There will be an intermission,” director Cecil B. DeMille announced during the movie’s introduction. And audiences’ bladders were relieved. On average, movies aren’t getting longer, but they also don’t come with a predetermined bathroom break. That means when nature calls, you’ve got to either sit in growing discomfort or gamble on the best time to run to the restroom. But it doesn’t have to be this way, and for most people, setting your body to “do not disturb” is fairly simple. Go before the show The first piece of advice is also the easiest: pee before the movie starts. Generally, healthy adults urinate every 3-4 hours, so the longer a movie runs, the more urgent it becomes to reset your internal p...
Post a Comment
Read more

Charted: Here's how much your food waste hurts the environment

[ad_1] Our species is pretty good at wasting food. Some we discard at the farm for being undersized or oddly shaped. Others we allow to decay in their shipping containers, thrown away before they even reach shelves. We leave even more foodstuffs wasting away in grocery stores, often by letting it sit there until it reaches its sell-by date. As consumers, we don’t have much control over most of the process that brings our food to the grocery store, but we do have control over how much food we personally waste. Let's face it: We’ve all found liquified lettuce in our veggie drawers. Don't fret. It's arguably impossible to consume 100 percent of the food we buy. But a healthy reminder of the effect food waste has on the environment might help us all to be more conscious of the amount of food we eat—and don't eat. Consumer food waste varies extensively depending on the area. In South and Southeast Asia, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that only around ...
Post a Comment
Read more