My friend Matt from Steadfast Finances sent me the link to the story, and I watched this on TV Sunday evening and it made me ill. Watching recycling companies send our toxic e-waste illegally to China and disposing it in one of the most toxic places on earth was heart-wrenching and shameful all at the same time. What is wrong with these people??

60 Minutes is going to take you to one of the most toxic places on Earth - a place government officials and gangsters don’t want you to see. It’s a town in China where you can’t breathe the air or drink the water, a town where the blood of the children is laced with lead.

It’s worth risking a visit because much of the poison is coming out of the homes, schools and offices of America. This is a story about recycling - about how your best intentions to be green can be channeled into an underground sewer that flows from the United States and into the wasteland.

Executive Recycling, of Englewood, Colo., which ran the Denver event, promised the public on its Web site: “Your e-waste is recycled properly, right here in the U.S. - not simply dumped on somebody else.”
Executive does recycling in-house, but 60 Minutes was curious about shipping containers that were leaving its Colorado yard. 60 Minutes found one container filled with monitors. They’re especially hazardous because each picture tube, called a cathode ray tube or CRT, contains several pounds of lead. It’s against U.S. law to ship them overseas without special permission. 60 Minutes took down the container’s number and followed it to Tacoma, Wash., where it was loaded on a ship. It turns out the container that started in Denver was just one of thousands of containers on an underground, often illegal smuggling route, taking America’s electronic trash to the Far East.

Seriously sickening. In the video we see how the air is filled with toxic smoke and the water is undrinkable, yet we watch kids play in the ponds and women wash clothes in the dangerously toxic water - all created from American e-waste that is supposed to be recycled correctly right here in the U.S.. These criminals should be in jail - or better yet, be made to clean up their mess with their bare hands. I will be looking into this for a future article and will try to come up with a list of recycling companies that are not on a list mentioned in the article of 42 other companies busted for doing the same thing as Executive Recycling. Sick.

You might also enjoy:

• 12 Reasons To Stop Drinking Bottled Water.
• How And Where To Recycle Household E-Waste.
• EarthTalk: Which Is Greener, Dryer Sheets Or Liquid Fabric Softener?
• Greenwash Of The Week: Air Wick Agua Essences.
• Greenwash Of The Week: Febreze-”It’s A Breath Of Fresh Air”.
• What Is 1,4-Dioxane And Why You Should Avoid It.

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