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Cars & TVs that last 25-years
April 29, 2012 Anuraag Sanghi	Leave a comment Go to comments
Garbage mush, mostly plastic and paper, three times bigger than India in size, floats across the Pacific and Atlantic. Progress and development …
Purple crab 'discovered' at Palawan, Philippines | Image source & courtesy – blogs.discovermagazine.com | Click for image.
Bright purple crabs with big red claws were one of four species recently discovered on the Phillipine island of Palawan during a study by the Senckenberg Research Institute in Germany and De La Salle University in Manila. Our Amazing Planet calls Palawan a "major biodiversity hotspot" and about half its species are found nowhere else on earth.
So of course the crabs' habitat is threatened, in this case by mining activities.
Of course it is. When was the last time you read a story that said, "Wow, look at these awesome animals and people are leaving them alone"? (via 10 Amazing Discoveries You Missed This Week | Environment | AlterNet).
Is this worth dying for?
This dig-and mine, the strip-and-bare system of natural exploitation by our 'development' only comes out with cars that need to be replaced every 5-10 years.
Is our global cardiac problem due to excess nitrogen via fertilizers in our food? The link between nitrogen and cardiac functioning is known.
Our first family-TV worked for 15 years. The second lasted all of 6 years. The third TV is in its 5th year. I am told that these LCD panels do not last for more than 7 years. Is there is a big difference between these three TVs. Not worth the Rs.1,00,000 (US$4000) that was spent on these TVs.
All this becomes trash, garbage, waste.
Where is this garbage going?
The "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" or "trash vortex" | Source & courtesy – cereplast.com; no creative details at source. | Click for larger image.
A "plastic soup" of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States.
The vast expanse of debris – in effect the world's largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting "soup" stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.
Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" or "trash vortex", believes that about 100 million tons of flotsam are circulating in the region. (The world's rubbish dump: a tip that stretches from Hawaii to Japan – Green Living – Environment – The Independent).
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch | Source: biglobe.ne.jp | Click for image.
It gets worse.
Billions of bits of plastic are accumulating in a massive garbage patch in the Atlantic Ocean—a lesser known cousin to the trash vortex in the Pacific.
"Many people have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch," said Kara Lavender Law, an oceanographer at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. (See pictures of the Pacific Ocean trash vortex.)
"But this issue has essentially been ignored in the Atlantic."
The newly described garbage patch sits hundreds of miles off the North American coast. Although its east-west span is unknown, the patch covers a region between 22 and 38 degrees north latitude—roughly the distance from Cuba to Virginia (see a U.S. map).
As with the Pacific garbage patch, plastic can circulate in this part of the Atlantic Ocean for years
Tiny pieces of trash, each less than a tenth the weight of a paper clip, make up most of the debris, Law said February 23 at the American Geophysical Union's 2010 Ocean Sciences meeting in Portland, Oregon..
In some places the students found more than 200,000 bits of trash per square kilometer (520,000 bits per square mile). The vast majority of these fragments come from consumer products that were blown out of open landfills or were tossed out by litterbugs.
Similar surface trawls in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch have found as many as 750,000 bits of plastic per square kilometer (1.9 million bits per square mile), noted marine chemist Giora Proskurowski, also with the Sea Education Association.
But that's only a portion of the total, he said, because waves often carry plastic as deep as 65 feet (20 meters) below the surface. (via Huge Garbage Patch Found in Atlantic Too).
Is this the only model?
Why can't we have a TV or cars that works for a generation – 25-years?
We can have aluminum and stainless steel cars that will last 25 years. Or made of plastics that have to be recycled by the manufacturer.
Technology updates can be modular. We don't have these products because of faulty tax policies.
Will our manufacturers come out with junk if they had to pay 25-year tax upfront?
A pollution tax paid upfront for 25 years on all industrial products. Future payments could adjusted against 25-year warranty fulfillment or when producer takes the product back from the consumer and recycles it.
In the meantime, maya rules.
We may be dying of myriad cancers, with our diabetic lifestyles – if we are not dead due to cardiac arrest.
But we are getting technology and progress.
Is that not good?
Great Pacific Garbage Patch infographic | Source & courtesy – webecoist.com | Click for image.
Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Japanese tsunami debris could drift to West Coast of US, experts say (vancouversun.com)
Categories: Environment, Europe, Social Trends, USA, World Economy Tags: Big Government, Environment, Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Cars & TVs that last 25-years: Will manufacturers come out with junk if they had to pay 25-year tax upfront? http://t.co/BxbN29U7
— St. PT Barnum (@StPTBarnum) April 29, 2012
Pollution Update : The world's largest rubbish dump | LEARN FROM NATURE
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