odour was tolerable to 19 th century sensitivities,
walking through the streets without boots resulted
in deplorable appearing footwear. In many cities,
lacking trash collection, pigs and dogs ran loose,
consuming the trash, but excreting dung, which
smelled offensively. Dead animals, particularly
horses, were left lying in the streets, facilitating
disease.
Ancient Solid Waste Disposal –
Sustaining Our World
The earliest laws we have concerning garbage
dumps comes from Athens, Greece in about 500
BC. They mandated dumping trash at least a mile
out of town and explicitly not in the streets.
In 200 AD, Rome instituted the first
documented sanitation force. It employed teams
of two men to pick up trash from the street.
They threw it into a wagon, and took it away.
‘Away’ in this case may have been a dump. Or
perhaps they simply emptied the wagon into the
Tiber somewhere downstream. Similar practices
continued in medieval Europe.
History records numerous laws of either a
kingdom or city to deal with household waste
management. As early as 1297, English towns
attempted to require householders to clear the
refuse from the front of the house.
As cities grew, they, like ancient Rome,
designated people to be responsible for collecting
waste and taking it out of town. Collecting waste
included raking excrement out of streets and alleys.
The French failed to follow Athens’ wisdom in
keeping the dump far from the gates. During the
Hundred Years War, enemy soldiers could climb
the massive garbage piles to storm the walls.
Difficulty in Electronics Recycling -
eToxics
One can spend all day figuring out where to take
e-waste, and once a recycling centre is found, there
is no guarantee that it will be safely recycled. Up to
80% of the US e-waste is exported to developing
countries where toxic components are burned,
dumped or smashed apart by impoverished
workers and children without proper protection.
‟
Extended Producer
Responsibility is a solution
that pushes companies to
eliminate toxins from their
products and production
facilities, take their products
back after consumers are
done with them and reuse the
materials from their recycling.
Or they are sent to the US prisons where inmates
work without federally protected health, safety or
labour rights. Only 10% of unwanted and obsolete
computers are recycled responsibly. Since
electronics are made with nearly 1,000 chemicals
and designed in such a way that they are difficult
to take apart, they are nearly impossible to recycle
them.
Policies have come out banning most
electronic products from landfills. Some have put
a consumer tax on electronic products for the cost
of their disposal while others require electronic
companies to pay for recycling. Washington and
Maine have recently passed the most extensive
e-waste bills in the country.
Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is a
policy that is being used in parts of the world such
as Japan and Europe. It includes electronics and
many other products, including cars! EPR requires
electronics companies to take responsibility for
the effects of their products, from the materials
used to the production, and to their disposal. EPR
is a solution that pushes companies to eliminate
toxins from their products and production facilities,
take their products back after consumers are
done with them and reuse the materials from
their recycling. This protects workers and the
environment through the entire life span of an
electronics product. Some companies have
already committed to an EPR approach and offer
to take back your computers and other electronics
items.
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