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The Most Important Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of

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The Most Important Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of

Lead interferes with the body’s battalion of antioxidants, damaging NA and killing neurons. Neurotransmitters, the chemical paperboys of the brain, stop delivering messages and start murdering nerve cells. Lead inhibits the brain’s development by stonewalling the process of synapse pruning, heightening the risk of learning disabilities. It also weakens the blood-brain barrier, a protective liner in your skull that blocks microscopic villains from infiltrating the brain, the result of which can lower IQs and even cause death. Lead poisoning is rarely caught in time. The heavy metal debilitates the mind so slowly that any impairment usually goes unnoticed until it’s too late.

Poisoning from pure tetraethyl lead, however, works differently. It moves quickly. Just a few teaspoons directly applied to the skin can kill. After soaking the dermis, it leaches into the brain, and, within weeks, causes symptoms similar to rabies: hallucinations, tremors, disorientation, and death. It’s not a miracle motor drug. It’s concentrated poison.
Map: Jockeybush Lake

Why it’s not worth recycling plastic | MoneyWeek

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Why it’s not worth recycling plastic | MoneyWeek

Is it news that big business plays dirty? No, but the extent of the deception, and the planning behind it, is striking. And it lends credence to the view espoused by both environmental campaigners and neoliberal economists that “plastic recycling is largely a fraud,” as Jim Puckett of the Basel Action Network, an NGO that campaigns against the illegal waste trade, puts it. In reality, much recycling – and certainly the recycling of plastics – is an uneconomic activity that merely gives us “moral licence to pollute”, says Michael Munger of the American Institute for Economic Research. It’s akin to the “indulgences” sold by the pre-Reformation church to exculpate sins. Putting out your plastics for collection is not so much a rational economic act, more a “religious ceremony”.

Those recycled bottles? Odds are, they will have no second act – VTDigger

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Those recycled bottles? Odds are, they will have no second act – VTDigger

Every day, Vermonters dutifully return glass bottles to redemption centers or put them into blue recycling bins with the idea they may be turned into brand new bottles.

But in reality, only a fraction of recycled bottles will have a second act, appearing on a store shelf containing beer or soda.

There is little market for the glass, experts say, and local solid waste districts are stuck with trying to get rid of a product that citizens are required to recycle so it’s not buried in a landfill.

 

Solving the Solvent Problem | National Real Estate Investor

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Solving the Solvent Problem | National Real Estate Investor

Dry cleaners did not begin using perc until the early 1980s, when, in an ironic twist, they were forced to do so by the U.S. Office of Safety and Health Administration. Prior to that time, dry cleaners had used a hydrocarbon-based product called stoddard. Though stoddard is relatively benign environmentally, it is extremely volatile and has a very low flash point. Stoddard had, in fact, been the primary culprit in a number of serious fires. Chlorine-based perchloroethylene, by contrast, is not especially volatile.

What OSHA did not realize was that perc has the unique ability to penetrate concrete. Moreover, when freed it quickly seeks the lowest point in its environment. As a result, the chemical rapidly descends through concrete floors into the soil and eventually into the groundwater. Once there, it flows wherever the groundwater flows.

Perc was found to cause cancer not long after it was introduced to the dry cleaning industry.