The new coal ash clean-up project will take four years and cost 268-million dollars. (Photo courtesy of Brian Stansberry)
More than a year ago – when an earthen wall broke at a power plant in Tennessee, 500-million gallons of toxic coal ash and water were spilled. If you compare it to other environmental tragedies – it was 50 times bigger than the Exxon Valdez spill. Half of the coal ash spill’s been cleaned up, but crews are still working to get the rest of it. And as Tanya Ott reports there are concerns about a new plan to deal with the ash:
Transcript
More than a year ago – when an earthen wall broke at a power plant in Tennessee – 500-million gallons of toxic coal ash and water were spilled. If you compare it to other environmental tragedies – it was 50 times bigger than the Exxon Valdez spill. Half of the coal ash spill’s been cleaned up, but crews are still working to get the rest of it. And as Tanya Ott reports there are concerns about a new plan to deal with the ash:
The plan comes from the US Environmental Protection Agency. Clean-up crews would scoop up the ash and put it in the same pit it came from… but the pit’s been reinforced with concrete. What the plan doesn’t call for, though, is a liner to make sure no metals leach into groundwater. Tennessee law and even the EPA’s new proposed coal ash rules require liners.
Craig Zeller is the project manager for the EPA. He says because this pit isn’t new – or expanding – it doesn’t have to comply with the rules. Plus, he says, water testing in the area shows there’s no problem with leaching.
“If, in the future it does show that we need to add a groundwater mediation piece to this, we will!”
Adding a liner after-the-fact could be difficult and expensive. The new clean-up project will take four years and cost 268-million dollars.
A nugget of cadmium.
(Photo courtesy of the US Dept. of Interior)
The Consumer Product Safety
Commission has been working
to get lead out of kids’ toys.
Now, the government agency
is trying to determine whether
it can do anything about another
toxic chemical found in toys –
a heavy metal called cadmium.
Mark Brush has more:
Transcript
The Consumer Product Safety
Commission has been working
to get lead out of kids’ toys.
Now, the government agency
is trying to determine whether
it can do anything about another
toxic chemical found in toys –
a heavy metal called cadmium.
Mark Brush has more:
The Consumer Product Safety Commission is reacting to a report by the Associated Press that found 12% of children’s jewelry had high levels of cadmium. Some of the pieces tested were almost completely made of cadmium. The heavy metal can cause kidney disease and it’s known to cause cancer.
Scott Wolfson is with the Consumer Product Safety Commission. He says that because of all the problems with lead in toy jewelry – the bottom line is that parents should just stay away.
“Over the past four years, we have done more than 50 recalls of more than 180 million units of jewelry. That’s astounding. It reached a point, where CPSC has been recommending to parents that they stop buying children’s metal jewelry for the youngest of kids.”
And some experts say – if you’ve got old toy jewelry in the house – it’s probably a good idea to get rid of it.
Mary Yeboa lives new Newmont's mine - an American gold mining company.
(Photo by Anna Boiko-Weyrauch)
Newmont's tailings dam - where gold mining waste is stored.
(Photo by Anna Boiko-Weyrauch)
After gold is processed, a mixture of sand, water, and cyanide is left over. This fall, some of this wastewater overflowed from Newmont's dam and got into the river.
(Photo by Anna Boiko-Weyrauch)
People that live near the river can’t go near the water because of security guards. So Newmont gave the community a well.
(Photo by Anna Boiko-Weyrauch)
Some gold and jewelry companies have signed codes of ethical conduct. Newmont is not one of them.
(Photo by Anna Boiko-Weyrauch)
Buying a piece of jewelry for
someone is often an emotional
celebration. But some people
are concerned about the damage
caused by mining that gold.
Anna Boiko-Weyrauch takes us from
the jewelry store to the gold mine:
(Research assistance
provided by the Investigative Fund
of the Nation Institute.)
Transcript
Buying a piece of jewelry for
someone is often an emotional
celebration. But some people
are concerned about the damage
caused by mining that gold.
Anna Boiko-Weyrauch takes us from
the jewelry store to the gold mine:
“It is a white gold band, with a star sapphire in the middle.”
In New York City, Sarah Lenigan is showing off her engagement ring. She got married this summer in California. Nowadays some people like her are starting to wonder where the stuff they buy comes from, including their wedding rings.
“You know the idea of the blood diamond, and not just the movie but, you do think about these things when you think about real jewelry. And this is the first time we’ve bought real jewelry, so it was a whole new ball game, I guess.”
It’s hard to say exactly where the gold in Sarah’s ring came from. Gold isn’t like other commodities – it’s almost impossible to track. But more and more, gold like Sarah’s is coming out of Ghana, in West Africa.
(driving sounds)
We’re driving over a dam on the Subri river in Ghana. The country used to be called the Gold Coast and today it’s the second largest producer of gold in Africa. Most of the gold comes out of a number of large surface mines. They’re all owned by companies from abroad.
At this dam, the American gold mining company, Newmont, stores water and waste from its gold mine.
Adusah Yakubu is with me. He’s a member of a local advocacy group. One side of the dam is green forest and clear water. But the other side looks like the surface of the moon.
“It looks like there’s cement in the river. It’s very hard, and it’s very gray. (What is that?) It’s a tailings dam.”
A tailings dam is where mining companies put waste from processing gold. After the precious metal is extracted, you get a mixture of sand and water. It also contains cyanide. Now, the chemical is poisonous, but it’s used all the time in gold mining. And miners work to control it.
But there are also accidents. Some of that waste overflowed this fall at Newmont’s mine, and killed fish downstream. The company says it was a minor event.
For the people who live around Newmont’s mine, the operations have really disrupted their lives. This river used to be the main source of drinking water and food for nearby villages. Kwame Kumah and his wife, Mary Yeboa live by the dam. They say they used to rely on the river for a lot of things.
“There are so many different things we got from the river. You could even get food from it, like fish, crab. But nowadays we can’t get anything from it.”
Now they can’t go near the water because of security guards. Newmont gave the community a well to make up for it. But the villagers say the dam has brought more mosquitoes, and with the mosquitos, disease. Although the company sold them discounted mosquito nets, Mary Yeboa says she gets sick much more than before.
“Right now, my body hurts all over. As I’m talking to you I have a headache, it really hurts. I don’t feel well at all.”
The gold mining company, Newmont declined to comment for this story.
The company sells its gold on the world market. Some people might buy it as investments, others for manufacturing. Or, it could end up as jewelry, like Sarah Lenigan’s engagement ring. That’s actually where most new gold goes, to jewelry.
Soon jewelry consumers, who care about their impact might be able to get some guidance. Certification systems such as the Responsible Jewelry Council are looking at gold, from the mine to the store.
Council CEO, Michael Rae says they are trying to clean up the jewelry business.
“It looks at environmental performance, social performance, labor standards, occupational health and safety, child labor issues and also in business ethics.”
The system won’t guarantee that gold or diamonds are from a specific mine, but it will reveal whether retailers and miners are making an effort to play fair.
Many jewelry and mining companies have signed on to the code. Newmont, the owner of the mine in Ghana we visited, is not a current member.
For The Environment Report, I’m Anna Boiko-Weyrauch.
Bassam Jody of Argonne National Laboratory
is helping develop novel ways of sorting and cleaning
shredder residue left over from cars, construction debris,
and major household appliances.
(Photo by Shawn Allee)
Auto shredder residue is a mish-mash of metal, foam and
plastics that get ejected from car shredders.
(Photo by Shawn Allee)
Argonne researchers hope to make the
process affordable for the scrap industry. They're perfecting
machines that separate plastics and other materials by
density and their proclivity to sink or float in the presence
of foamy bubbles.
(Photo by Shawn Allee)
We’ve all heard over and over again
about that government program ‘Cash
for Clunkers.’ It’s got drivers
thinking about what exactly happens
to dead cars, regardless of how they
die. Shawn Allee looks at
how car recycling works and who’s
trying to improve it:
Transcript
We’ve all heard over and over again about that government program ‘Cash for Clunkers.’ It’s got drivers thinking about what exactly happens to dead cars, regardless of how they die. Shawn Allee looks at how car recycling works and who’s trying to improve it:
You might not think about it this way, but your car just might be the biggest thing you own that gets recycled.
I mean, someday you’re going to junk it, or maybe some future owner will. Anyway, I’m out in front of a car shop in my neighborhood, and with the health of cars in mind, I thought I’d ask some people around here, percentage-wise, just how much of a junked car gets recycled?
“I would say maybe, like, 5% of the car.”
“I’ll say, 20% – 30% probably, of a car.”
“I guess the recycled one could be 30% of the car.”
“I guess, like, 50%.”
“About 70%.”
++
In my little unscientific survey here, it turns out that most people are giving a pretty low estimate of how much of a junked car ends up being recycled.
The auto industry and the federal environmental protection agency say about 80% of the junked car gets recycled. The rest heads to landfills. That sounds pretty good, but that means we bury about five million tons of junked car pieces each year.
To understand why they can’t recycle even more of the car, I’m going to talk with Jim Watson.
He runs ABC Auto Wreckers in a suburb just south of Chicago.
“We don’t want to landfill anything. The objective is to take the vehicle, process it and have all the parts be used.”
Watson shows me his shop where he pulls parts for the used market. A dozen workers lift hoods, twist tires, and pull out stuff I don’t even recognize. It’s like an assembly line in reverse.
“They do an analysis and inventory each of the parts of the car that have a probability of sale and then they harvest or pull those parts off the car.”
Watson and some of the bigger auto wreckers have parts-scrapping down to a science, but it’s expensive to keep pulling parts and keep space open for scrap yards.
Eventually, Watson’s pulls off everything usefull and he’ll send it to a car shredder.
“A machine that beats it apart and shreds the car into small fist-sized or hand-sized components.”
Recyclers can pull out big shreds of steel and aluminum, but about 20% of the car is left-over. This shredder residue gets tossed into landfills. But scientists are thinking about how to recycle this shredded mess.
One works at a lab at Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago.
“This is what shredder residue looks like.”
Dr. Bassam Jody reaches into a cardboard box and scoops a jumble of car seat foam, metal cable, wood, and shards of plastic.
Jody says shredder residue is a recycler’s nightmare.
“Maybe there are more than twenty different kinds of plastics. I tell you, plastics are generally incompatible, they don’t like each other and they don’t work together very well.”
Jody is developing machines to safely clean and separate all this stuff. It’s tough science.
Jody: “The more things you have in the mixture, the harder it is to separate. The trick is, you have to do it economically, and to produce materials that can be used in value-added products.”
Allee: “What can you make out of them?”
Jody: “Car parts. For example, this is a seating column cover.”
Jody says he gets a kick out of his work. He might just squeeze a bit more good out of our cars.
The scrap heap - what's left of hundreds of cars and other metal waste after they go through a shredder. (Photo by Tamara Keith)
All those clunkers are working their
way toward the final melt-down at
a steel mill. Lester Graham reports
you’ll see the steel from those clunkers
again:
Transcript
All those clunkers are working their
way toward the final melt-down at
a steel mill. Lester Graham reports
you’ll see the steel from those clunkers
again:
The steel from those clunkers from the “Cash for Clunkers” program will eventually be melted down and used again.
Bill Heenan is the President of the Steel Recycling Institute. He says it’ll be a few months before that scrap gets recycled.
“It takes some time for that old automobile, the clunker in this particular case, to work its way through the dismantling system and then through the shredding system and eventually to the steel mill.”
Scrap yards can remove things such as fenders or hubcaps for used parts, but what’s left – including the engines – goes to the shredder.
Bill Heenan says those 700,000 clunkers won’t mean a glut of scrap steel.
“Let’s say there’s a ton of steel in each one, you’ve got 700,000 tons. That seems like a lot. But in a given year, we recycle 80-million tons.”
That 80-million tons of scrap is melted down and becomes the bulk of new steel products in the U.S., including new cars.
Molycorp's rare-earth mining pit in Mountain Pass, California. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
To cut water use, Molycorp's installed new waste water ponds and
recycling equipment. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
Beneath this 60-acre spot are 100 feet of mine tailings, which
include salts and other mining by-products. The site's being remediated and
capped with vegetation, to ensure water doesn't move contaminants underground.
It's part of Molycorp's plan to recover from waste water leaks during the 1990s. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
Politicians like to show off pictures of wind turbines, hybrid cars, and other green hi-tech.
The idea is to get more of that in America, and maybe even make more of it here. Shawn
Allee found there’s a chance all of this could be complicated by the supply of key green-
tech ingredients:
Transcript
Politicians like to show off pictures of wind turbines, hybrid cars, and other green hi-tech.
The idea is to get more of that in America, and maybe even make more of it here. Shawn
Allee found there’s a chance all of this could be complicated by the supply of key green-
tech ingredients:
I don’t know about you, but there’re a whole bunch of minerals I completely ignored in
high school chemistry.
Jack Lifton knows them by heart.
“… lanthenum, serium, neodymium…”
Lifton’s a market expert on these so-called ‘rare-earth’ minerals. And he says, even if you
haven’t heard of them, you might have them – even in your pocket.
“Without rare earths, we probably would not have portable computers and you
certainly wouldn’t have display screens today on anything – television or computer,
iPod, or iPhone, whatever.”
Rare earths make electronics light and they don’t need much power: just what wind
turbines and electric hybrid cars need.
There’s a problem in the rare-earth market, though. China’s the big supplier, but Lifton
says it might keep it’s rare-earth supplies for itself.
“In the next three or four years, you cannot make a device with a rare earth unless
it’s made in China and then the Chinese have made it very clear that their priorities
are to manufacture goods for their own consumer economy and keep the Chinese
employed.”
So, is the US gonna be left dry when it comes to green high tech? Well, there is a rare
earth mine in America, but it’s had some environmental problems.
The mine is trying to turn that around now.
Honan: “On the left is the overburden stock pile. Once you’ve seen one of those,
you’ve seen them all.”
Allee: “Big pile of rocks.”
Honan: “Big pile of rock.”
Mine manager Scott Honan’s driving me around the top of a mine in the middle of the
California desert.
He manages the mine for Molycorp. Honan’s showing me the mine’s waste water
ponds.
Honan: “Those two are fresh water.”
Allee: “Basically, you’re trying to recycle as much of this water as you can. Why is
that?”
Honan: “We have to confine all of our water activities on the site. We have to be
very efficient when we use water, we can’t afford to waste it.”
Gotta admit, this is not very sexy stuff, but Molycorp is crossing its fingers that
expensive water recycling and treatment investments pay off.
Molycorp uses water to process the rare-earth ore, and back in the 90s, the mining and
processing stopped for a while due to waste water leaks.
It’s desert, after all – and regulators didn’t want what little water there is contaminated by
a slurry of salts and mining byproducts.
Allee: “So where’re we heading, here?”
Honan: “The pit.”
Allee: “Is that what everyone calls it? ‘The Pit?’”
Honan: “Yeah. It’s about 55 acres if you look at the perimeter. From the top of the
high wall over there to the bottom, it’s about 500 feet.”
Honan says Molycorp will expand the mine in a few years – just in time for when China
might stop exporting rare-earths.
The company might be jumping a tad – regulators might clamp down on the operation if
Molycorp repeats some of its past water pollution mistakes.
Still…
“I think a lot of us at the mine have a big stake in the success of this operation going
forward. A lot of us feel it’s important for our country. What we produce here is
going to drive a lot of this energy efficient technology that people are anxious about.
It’s cool to be a part of that.”
And for Honan, what’s even cooler is that someone’s talking about building a wind farm
not too far from his mine.
Honan says it’d be awefully nice if his rare-earths are in those turbines.
BPA doesn't line just baby products - it is in many canned foods and drinks (Source: Tomomarusan at Wikimedia Commons)
Food-packaging executives and
lobbyists for the makers of the
chemical bisphenol-A, often
called BPA, met in Washington
DC last week to come up with PR
strategies. Their message is:
BPA is safe. Lester Graham reports
someone took notes at that meeting
and then leaked them to reporters:
Transcript
Food-packaging executives and
lobbyists for the makers of the
chemical bisphenol-A, often
called BPA, met in Washington
DC last week to come up with PR
strategies. Their message is:
BPA is safe. Lester Graham reports
someone took notes at that meeting
and then leaked them to reporters:
Lyndsey Layton got ahold of those notes. She reports for the Washington Post.
“According to these notes, they called it the ‘holy grail’ spokesperson would be a pregnant, young mother who would be willing to speak around the country about the benefits of BPA.”
Ironic in that many studies associate BPA with birth defects.
John Rost is the Chairman of the North American Metal Packaging Alliance.
He says the reporters got bad notes. He says it only came up because environmental activists used pregnant women to testify against BPA.
“We discussed that as an option and dismissed it and actually find it a little ironic that we are being criticized.”
Some retailers have taken toys and baby bottles made with BPA off the shelf in response to a consumer backlash.
It’s likely most consumers don’t yet realize the chemical also lines beverage and food cans.
Recellular employee Myron Woods tests phones
to see if they can be resold or re-used. Here, he's got a
Nokia 6019, the model reporter Shawn Allee dropped off for
recycling. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
Mark Glavin's shop in Franklin Park, Illinois
is part of sims Recycling solutions. Glavin's machines and
furnaces recover gold, silver and other metals from phones
that Recellular can't find a market for. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
Michigan-based Recellular sorts through millions
of used cell phones, hoping to find ones that can be resold
for secondary phone markets, including those overseas. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
Sims Recycling turns bins of cells phones into
inch-sized chunks that can be further processed for recycling. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
It’s pretty clear Americans like their cell phones. On average, we get a new one about every
eighteen months. And yet, we hold on to the old ones, too; the government estimates there’re
about one hundred million lying around in closets and drawers. Shawn Allee found people eager
to take your old phones – if only you’d recycle them:
Transcript
It’s pretty clear Americans like their cell phones. On average, we get a new one about every
eighteen months. And yet, we hold on to the old ones, too; the government estimates there’re
about one hundred million lying around in closets and drawers. Shawn Allee found people eager
to take your old phones – if only you’d recycle them:
I put an old phone in a recycling box a while ago.
I checked around and found it went to one of the nation’s largest phone refurbishers.
It’s a company called Recellular. And it’s based in an old auto parts plant in Dexter, Michigan.
“It’s a big open space with a lot of room to handle the 20,000 phones that come in every day.
You need a lot of benches, you need a lot of cubby holes.”
Vice President Mike Newman points to some incoming collection boxes.
“Every box is a mystery. You have no idea what’s in there until you open it up and start
sorting it out.”
Newman’s company is hunting for working phones to resell here or overseas. Before that, his
people sort and test every model of phone.
And workers like Myron Woods remove personal data.
“Contacts, the voice mails, the ringtones, text messages. Hit OK and the phone’s cleared
out. After that you make sure the phone calls out. You get a ringtone, you hear the
operator, and then you’re done.”
Newman: “In 2008 we processed almost 6 million phones and for 2009, we’re looking at
more than double-digit growth again.”
And of those six million phones, Mike Newman says he can sell about half of them. He’d do
better if people like me didn’t keep phones in drawers for so long.
“The longer you wait, the less value it has so, if you move down from that old phone, as
hard as it might be to part with it, it’s really important to recycle it as soon as possible – it
will do the most good.”
What about Newman’s other phones – the duds? He has a different company near Chicago
recycle them.
Allee: “And here they are … holy mackerel.”
I’m now at Simms Recycling Solutions. A conveyer belt is moving thousands of phones.
“There’s the end of the line for your cell phones.”
Mark Glavin is the VP of operations here. He says there’s gold, silver, and other metals in the
phones he gets from Recellular.
“The cell phones get shredded into somewhat uniform-sized pieces.”
Glavin sticks the pieces in an oven to burn off the plastic – and then grinds what’s left.
Glavin: “That’s what’s left of the cell phones.”
Allee: “It’s almost like the powder you use for a baby, except its black.”
Glavin: “Yes.”
Glavin says there’s gold and other metal in the powder – so metal companies will buy it.
He also has stubborn chunks of metal that won’t grind.
“Those get pulled off and then those go to the furnace room to be melted.”
Glavin: “This is appropriately named the furnace room, where all the melting goes on. It
gets nice and toasty in here in the winter time.”
Allee: “Wow, what are we seeing here?”
Glavin: “After the material has been melted, we’ll cast it into molds and into 30-40 pound
ingots.”
He’ll sell metal from these ingots along with that black powder.
Recellular and Glavin’s company recovers about 96 pounds of gold from its phones each year.
Plus, that gold’s worth more than a million dollars. And recycling saves energy, and prevents
pollution from gold mining.
Glavin says recycling is taking off, and he can always count on people wanting the latest and
greatest phones.
Glavin: “Pretty soon your cell phone will be a chip like, on an ear-ring and a watch, and
there’s nothing to it except for a very tiny electronic.”
Allee: “And people will still swap it for the next one.”
A chlorine manufacturing plant is discharging mercury at the highest rate of any industrial plant in the nation. A state agency is trying to get the plant to reduce the pollution. The GLRC’s Fred Kight has the story:
Transcript
A chlorine manufacturing plant is discharging mercury at the highest rate of any
industrial plant in the nation. A state agency is trying to get the plant to reduce the
pollution. The GLRC’s Fred Kight has the story:
The PPG Industries plant has dumped as much as 32 pounds of mercury a year into the
Ohio River. Mercury is a toxic chemical that causes nerve damage in humans. West
Virginia’s Environmental Quality Board found that state regulators had allowed PPG to
dump mercury in amounts many times the legal limit.
Margaret Janes is with the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment.
She praised the decision against the plant:
“They’re using a technology that is from the 1800s. There are other cleaner technologies available.”
The plant reportedly is one of only nine in the country that makes chlorine by pumping
saltwater through vats of pure mercury. PPG Industries says it will appeal the West
Virginia ruling.
Many people do not know what to do with old computers and
equipment, so they end up in the trash.
Electronic waste can potentially contain harmful chemicals like
lead, mercury, and cadmium. Recycling computers and other electronics is a
way to help the environment.
If you bought a new computer over the holidays, there are plenty of places to drop off your household’s old computer. But to prevent more of the old monitors, laptops and other items from winding up in landfills, some Midwest states are looking to make sure computer makers get involved in recycling their products. One of the few manufacturers that already helps re-use old computer parts is Texas-based Dell, Incorporated. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach went to a Dell-sponsored recycling center and has this
report:
Transcript
If you bought a new computer over the holidays, there are plenty of
places to drop off your household’s old computer, but to prevent more
of the old monitors, laptops and other items from winding up in
landfills, some Midwest states are looking to make sure computer
makers get involved in recycling their products. One of the few
manufacturers that already helps re-use old computer parts is
Texas-based Dell, Incorporated. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Chuck Quirmbach went to a Dell-sponsored recycling center and has this
report:
About a year ago, Dell helped set up and publicize a computer
recycling plant at a Goodwill Industries facility in Dell’s home city
of Austin.
(Sound of clunking)
Goodwill employees and volunteers sort through the hundreds of
boxes of computers and computer parts that are dropped off – at no
charge to the consumer – at the site. Newer computers are set aside
for repairs, and hard drive memories are erased. Older computers go
to a bench where workers like Paul take apart (or demanufacture)
them.
“I’m taking apart all the useable parts. Motherboard, power sources,
cards, ports, metal goes into bins, plastic goes into bins for
recycling and what not.”
(Sound of ambience switch)
Goodwill sells the reusable parts at its retail store elsewhere in the
building. Used LCD monitors, for example, go for as low as twenty
dollars.
Manager Christine Banks says some of the equipment is under
a 30-day Goodwill warranty. Other parts can be exchanged if the
customer isn’t satisfied. Banks says Goodwill is happy this computer-
recycling program makes a profit.
“Our operation does. However, there are 7 or 8 other Goodwills
throughout the country that do this that barely break even. We’re just
fortunate we have higher tech donations, a pool of employees with
more technology, it’s very tricky.”
Some states charge high disposal costs for unwanted computer parts,
which can contain potentially harmful chemicals. Those high costs can
make it difficult for a recycling program to get off the ground, but
environmental groups say the fast-growing pile of circuit boards,
monitors, and plastic parts can leach poisons like lead, mercury, and
cadmium into the environment.
They say small-scale projects like the one in Austin have to be part of a
broader effort to keep electronic waste out of the nation’s landfills. That
effort could include government mandates forcing manufacturers to
safely dispose of old products.
Robin Schneider is with the Austin office of the National Computer
Takeback Campaign.
“So, to really deal with the environmental problems of millions of
pounds of toxins, we’re gonna need something bigger than this. This is a
piece of it…and gonna need lot of pieces of it.”
Schneider says she’s encouraged that some Midwest states are
looking into manufacturer takeback programs. She acknowledges that
recycling may drive up the cost of new computers, but she also says
manufacturers may start redesigning computers so that it’s more
profitable for the companies to take them back.
The new coal ash clean-up project will take four years and cost 268-million dollars. (Photo courtesy of Brian Stansberry)
