Fumes spewed from the machinery as workers — wearing only T-shirts, sandals and no masks — at a recycling factory in northern Malaysia manually sorted through mountains of plastic scrap.
The workers, mainly from Bangladesh, earned around $12 a day, sometimes toiling seven days a week.
The labour was "very cheap," said one businessman, as he gave a tour to undercover CBC Marketplace journalists posing as plastics brokers from a fake Canadian company.
A short time after ingestion, the alkaloids produce potentially fatal neuromuscular dysfunction due to failure of the respiratory muscles. Acute toxicity, if not lethal, may resolve in spontaneous recovery, provided further exposure is avoided.
The onset of symptoms is similar to that caused by curare, with an ascending muscular paralysis leading to paralysis of the respiratory muscles, causing death from oxygen deprivation. Death can be prevented by artificial ventilation until the effects have worn off 48–72 hours later. For an adult, the ingestion of more than 100mg (0.1 gram) of coniine (about six to eight fresh leaves, or a smaller dose of the seeds or root) may be fatal.
The big game is about to start. You kick back in your arm chair in front of your beloved big-screen TV, put your feet up and pop open a brewski. While you’re waiting for the teams to take the field, you find yourself contemplating one of the great mysteries of our age: Why is your beer not in a plastic bottle?