I. Solid and hazardous waste | revisit the class assignment on toxic waste sites

A. Two famous incidents illustrate the dangers of dealing with hazardous waste – Love Canal (p. 519) and the Bhopal chemical spill

B. overview of what we throw out – p. 520-522

• The Story of Stuff - a movie on product life cycles
• household hazardous waste
• How mercury ends up in fish (more info)
• EPA's mercury page
• USGS toxic substances program
• Toxic release inventory - companies must report releases of toxic chemicals
• Get tested for mercury
• EPA's state-by-state listing of fish consumption advisories -based on toxic contamination
• ToxTown is a webpage that looks at household sources of toxic materials.  Use the related ToxMap page to search for toxic substances in real places
• National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals
• Use the Sierra Club "Zoomer" site to look up local info on toxic pollution
• check out Toxicology info
• salt as a toxic material
• Toxicology tutorials
• Toxmap - superfund sites and toxic releases
• Haz-map: occupational exposure to hazardous materials
• Household products database
• Smithsonian scientists track mercury in a remote Canadian lake
• Plastic bottles - some are sources of potentially toxic or carcinogenic breakdown products
• Chemical toxicity data - material safety data sheets
• Photos depicting the huge amounts of batteries, bottles, cell phones, etc that are "thrown away" each year

C. approaches to handling waste | see links on renewable/environmentally friendly products

• creative use of trash as art
• the poor and disadvantaged have often been forced to deal with more waste and pollution than other members of society.  Check out Green for All
• Ocean trash is a big problem.  Check out the trash vortex in the Pacific Ocean.  More here
  

1. priorities - fig. 22-5

2. Sanitary landfills – fig. 22-12 and 22-13

• what happens to your trash when you throw it "away" - including a landfill tour
• tour a sewage treatment plant (Johnstown, PA)
• tour the Blue Plains sewage treatment plant in DC | Check out a map-based list of other water treatment plants in our area
• Go with the flow - an overview of sewage treatment
• How sewage treatment plants work | another site from Melbourne, Australia

3. burning wastes – incinerators (“waste-to-energy”) – fig. 22-10 and 22-11

4. Industrial ecology focuses on integrating industrial processes so that waste materials and energy are easily used (fig.15-19) (example - Kalundborg, Denmark) (more here)

5. a shift to service flow economy focuses on providing services rather than goods; this approach encourages companies to design efficient equipment with re-usable parts and reduce waste (pg. 582)

6. reducing use of materials and reusing materials - fig. 22-7 and 22-8

7. re-use materials

• neigh-borrow is a website that give you opportunities to borrow materials instead of buying them | borrow me is the same concept
  

8. recycling

• composting
  
• recycling pros and cons: fig. 22-9
• Two types: p. 526-527
• lots of info on plastics and recycling | a guide to types of plastic and an overview of potential health issues
• computer recycling | share the technology program | another computer recycling site | EZ-trade-in | Basel Action Network | E-cycling (EPA)
• "organic recycling" (composting)
• learn where you can recycle hazardous materials and other products
• cell phone recycling
• Paper or plastic: which should you choose?
• recycling shoes, electronics, mattresses, and other hard-to-recycle things
• Earth911 - find out where to recycling stuff
• Top 10 principles of Good Consumption
• Sign a pledge to use no plastic
• videos and animations of how recycling works (Waste Management Co) | more clips here

8. detoxifying and handling toxic materials

• phytoremediation - fig. 22-17 and 22-18
• deep well injection and other storage solutions – fig. 24-21, 22
• special threats – lead (fig. 22-24 and 22-25), mercury (fig. 22-25 and 22-26), chlorine, and dioxins
• more on mercury - fact sheet from USGS and info from Sierra club
  

D. Hazardous waste regulation

1. Superfund program and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (more here) in the US – p. 534-535

• use Enviromapper to find hazardous waste sites by geographic region
• explore Superfund sites using a report from Publicintegrity.org. 
• EPA Window to My Environment

2. brownfields development

• DestiNY USA is a major development planned for the Syracuse, NY area.  It will use only renewable energy sources and be developed in a "brownfield" area.  More details here.
  

3. POP treaty (international)